Quantitative Study on Despeckle Methods of Medical Ultrasound Images

Speckle is a granular noise that inherently exists in all types of coherent imaging systems. This paper presents a quantitative study on five despeckling methods such as frost filter, kuan filter, speckle reducing an isotropic diffusion, homomorphic filter and wavelet filter. We select six objective evaluation parameters, such as signal-to-ratio, contrast signal-to-noise ratio, figure of merit, least absolute error, edge protection factor, signal-to-minimum mean square error ratio, to quantify the performance of these filters. The comparative study will provide some parameter comparative reference for selecting a suitable filter in the ultrasound image processing.