Local Histogram Matching Based Bilateral Filter to Ultrasound Speckle Reduction

Because of its non-destructive, real-time and ease of use, medical ultrasound becomes an important instrument of modern medical imaging modalities. Due to unresolved tissue scatterers limited by the resolution of the ultrasound probe, the formed image shows granular-like speckle noise which will deteriorate the quality of ultrasound images and result in difficulties in diagnosis. In order to reduce the speckle noise, this paper presents a bilateral filtering adjusted from the detection of speckle statistics derived from local histogram matching. The proposed algorithm can reduce the speckle noise and, at the same time, maintain the tissue structure. Ultrasound phantom testing and in vivo imaging show that the proposed method can improve the quality of ultrasound image in terms of tissue SNR and CNR values.