Spatio-temporal speckle reduction in ultrasound sequences

Abstract

In this paper we will be concerned with speckle removal in ultrasound images. To this end, we introduce a new spatio-temporal denoising method based on a variational formulation. The regularization relies on a non parametric image model that describes the observed image structure and express inter-dependencies between pixels in space and time. Furthermore, we introduce a new data term adapted to the Rayleigh distribution of the speckle. The interaction between pixels is determined through the definition of new measure of similarity between them to better reflect image content. To compute this similarity measure, we take into consideration the spatial aspect as well as the temporal one. Experiments were carried on both synthetic and real data and the results show the potential of our method. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.