Correlation analysis of ultrasonic speckle for motion estimation

Synthetic aperture techniques permit low-cost ultrasonic imaging systems, but are susceptible to motion artifacts. Motion compensation is crucial in imaging of non-stationary structures. In this study, correlation analysis of ultrasonic speckle signals for correlation based motion estimation is presented. Correlation measurements with different system parameters, such as the subaperture size, inter-firing distance and kernel size, are performed using experimental data acquired from a diffuse scattering phantom. The efficiency of the correlation based motion estimation is tested qualitatively on the phantom image.