Frequency domain despeckling technique for medical ultrasound images

Jawad F. Al-Asad – Hiren K. Mewada – Adil H. Khan –
Nidal Abu-Libdeh – Jamal F. Nayfeh

   This work proposes a novel frequency domain despeckling technique pertaining to the enhancement of the quality of medical ultrasound images. The results of the proposed method have been validated in comparison to both the time-domain and the frequency-domain projections of the schur decomposition as well as with several other benchmark schemes such as frost, lee, probabilistic non-local means (PNLM) and total variation filtering (TVF). The proposed algorithm has shown significant improvements in edge detection and signal to noise ratio (SNR) levels when compared with the performance of the other techniques. Both real and simulated medical ultrasound images have been used to evaluate the numerical and visual effects of each algorithm used in this work.

Keywords: despeckling, schur decomposition, ultrasound image, covariance matrix, frequency domain, orthonormal vectors

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