Wavelet-Based Despeckling of Medical Ultrasound Images with the Symmetric Normal Inverse Gaussian Prior

A major problem in medical ultrasonography is the inherent corruption of ultrasound images with speckle noise that severely hampers the diagnosis and automatic image processing tasks. In this paper, an efficient wavelet-based method is proposed for despeckling medical ultrasound images. A closed-form Bayesian wavelet-based maximum a posteriori denoiser is developed in a homomorphic framework, based on modelling the wavelet coefficients of the log-transform of the reflectivity with a symmetric normal inverse Gaussian (SNIG) prior. A simple method is presented for obtaining the parameters of the SNIG prior using local neighbors. Thus, the proposed method is spatially adaptive. Experiments are carried out using synthetically speckled and real ultrasound images, and the results show that the proposed method performs better than several other existing methods in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio and visual quality.