Coherence adaptive speckle filter for ultrasound image

In this paper, we propose a coherence adaptive speckle filter to reduce the speckle in ultrasound images. The conventional adaptive filters, which are used for speckle filtering of SAR images, used SNR measure to discriminate the noise and signal. In case of ultrasound images, the connectivity of the structure elements is important. Therefore, we propose an adaptive speckle filter, which uses the coherence measure to discriminate the signal from noise. The proposed method is compared to the conventional Lee filter using contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). It has been shown that the proposed method gives higher CNR, and less sensitive to noise.