A compound anisotropic diffusion for ultrasonic image denoising and edge enhancement

Utilizing the echoic intension and the distribution from different organs and local details of the human body, ultrasonic images can catch important medical pathological changes, which unfortunately may be affected by ultrasonic speckle noise. An ultrasonic image denoising and edge enhancement scheme is put forth, which compounds two terms: an anisotropic diffusion and an edge enhancement, coupled by an iterative split implementation. To preserve image features, the anisotropic diffusion is governed by a local coordinate transformation, the first and second normal derivatives of the image, and the edge enhancement is done by a hyperbolic tangent function. Experiments on real ultrasonic images indicate effective preservation of edges, local details and ultrasonic echoic bright strips on denoising by our scheme.