An Adaptive Edge Enhancement Method Based on Histogram Matching for Ultrasound Images

This paper presents an adaptive edge enhancement method based on histogram matching for ultrasound images. Because of the speckle noises of ultrasound images, traditional edge enhancement methods do not work well for ultrasound images. The proposed method is to seek the regions whose edges needs to be enhanced and ruling out the error edges caused either by speckle noises or the reverberation artifacts. A region covered an edge in original image has been selected as the match template first. Then the similar values between pending image block and the match template are calculated according to local histogram matching. And the local image block is enhanced when its similar value reached on a certain level. Furthermore, the ultimately enhanced result is achieved by the method of multiple images weighted average. The experiments results show the proposed method can leave speckle unchanged and enhance tissue boundaries.