Fast Adaptive Ultrasound Speckle Reduction with Bilateral Filter on CUDA

The Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) is a new parallel processing platform making use of the unified shader design of the most current Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from NVIDIA. In this paper, we apply this revolutionary new technology to implement the speckle reduction with adaptive bilateral filter for medical ultrasound imaging. The parallel speckle detection and mask producing with space for time algorithms are also presented. This bilateral filter method achieves a frame rate of 30 fps for the 256x512 image with once iteration, about 44 times faster than the CPU implementation. Testing results from GPU and CPU are compared in terms of visual image quality and program runtime with different image sizes.