Abstract
Ultrasound imaging, also known as ultrasound scanning or sonography, is a very popular medical test that helps medical doctors diagnose and treat medical conditions of their patients. However, one common problem that persists is that ultrasound images suffer from speckle noise that degrades their quality. In this paper we present an enhancement technique for ultrasound images by making use of three consecutive frames extracted from an ultrasound video. The technique uses the optical flow algorithm to reconstruct an intermediate frame based on the preceding and the following frames. The reconstructed image is then utilized to enhance the middle frame by mean of fusion. Based on the test, the best result is achieved using Lukas-Kanade optical flow and average operator.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Evans, A.N., Nixon, M.S.: Biased Motion-Adaptive Temporal Filtering for Speckle Reduction in Echoradiography. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 15(1), 39–50 (1996)
Munteanu, C., Morales, F.C., Fernández, J.G., Rosa, A., Déniz, L.G.: Enhancing Obstetric and Gynecology Ultrasound Images by Adaptation of the Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion Filter. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 43, 223–242 (2008)
Filho, E.D.S., Yoshizawa, M., Iwamoto, T., Tanaka, A., Saijo, Y.: Morphological Fuzzy Filter for Enhancement of Intravascular Ultrasound Images. In: SICE Annual Conference in Sapporo, Japan (2004)
Coleshill, J.E., Ferworn, A., Stacey, D.: Image Enhancement using Frame Extraction Through Time. In: 2007 International Conference on Systems, Computing Sciences and Software Engineering (CISSE), pp. 131–135 (2007)
Liasis, N., Klonaris, C., Katsargyris, A., Georgopoulos, S., Labropoulos, S., Tsigris, C., Giannopoulos, A., Bastounis, E.: The Use of Speckle Reduction Imaging (SRI) Ultrasound, in the Characterization of Carotid Artery Plaques. European Journal of Radiology 65, 427–433 (2008)
Nam, T.J., Park, R.H., Yun, J.H.: Optical Flow Based Frame Interpolation of Ultrasound Images. In: 2006 International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR), pp. 792–803 (2006)
Jung, S.C., Woo, H.B., Paik, J.K., Choi, W.: Enhancement of Inter-Frame Coded Images Based on Convex Projection. In: 1999 IEEE TENCON, pp. 1275–1278 (1999)
Grau, V., Noble, J.A.: Motion-Guided Anisotropic Filtering of Ultrasound Sequences. ISBI, 209–212 (2006)
Rallabandi, V.P.S.: Enhancement of Ultrasound Images using Stochastic Resonance-Based Wavelet Transform. Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics 32, 316–320 (2008)
Zhao, W.Y.: Motion-Based Spatial-Temporal Image Repairing. In: 2004 International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), pp. 291–294 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Achmad, B., Mustafa, M.M., Hussain, A. (2009). Inter-frame Enhancement of Ultrasound Images Using Optical Flow. In: Badioze Zaman, H., Robinson, P., Petrou, M., Olivier, P., Schröder, H., Shih, T.K. (eds) Visual Informatics: Bridging Research and Practice. IVIC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5857. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05036-7_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05036-7_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-05035-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-05036-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)