A modified total variation denoising method in the context of 3D ultrasound images

Abstract

Ultrasound volumes are corrupted by a multiplicative noise, the speckle, which makes high level analysis difficult. Within each resolution cell a number of elementary scatterers reflects the incident wave toward the sensor. This paper proposes a method of restoration based on variational principles adapted to ultrasound images statistics. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: we first derive a modified TV scheme to integrate the multiplicative nature of the ultrasound noise and we propose to tune the parameter A automatically accordingly to the local noise distribution thanks to the kurtosis information. We present qualitative and quantitative results on various ultrasound volumes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.