Log domain speckle noise reduction in ultrasonographic animal images

Abstract

Ultrasound and SAR images are corrupted with speckle noise which is multiplicative type noise. Reduction of this noise is very essential to use these images for better information retrieval. In the literature there are many techniques available to reduce speckle noise where each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. In the current communication, a modification to some of those techniques has proposed; specifically the additive speckle noise reduction is proposed in the log domain. When an image is transformed to log domain then multiplicative speckle noise is also transformed to additive noise and this noise can be reduced using additive noise reduction models. Modified techniques have been applied on standard and ultrasonographic animal images. Experiments validates that this approach produces better results than applying these techniques directly on images with speckle noise. The quality of resultant images is measured using SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) and PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio). © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.