Suppression of speckle noise in ultrasound images using bilateral filter

Abstract

The suppression of speckle noise is necessary for clear vision of ultrasound images. The quality of ultrasound images is degraded by the presence of speckle noise. In this work, bilateral Filter is used to suppress speckle noise. Conventionally, this filter is used to suppress the Gaussian noise from the images. A bilateral filter is better at edge preserving, noise suppression and for better smoothening of gray as well as colored images. Bilateral filter tends to improve image quality as it replaces the intensity of each pixel with a weighted average of intensity values from nearby pixels. These weights are basically based on Gaussian distribution function. The three parameters have been used to analyze the performance of bilateral filter the are PSNR, SSIM, and SSI.