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Comparison of Despeckle Filters for Breast Ultrasound Images

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Abstract

It is well known that the quality of ultrasound image is significantly degraded by the speckle noise, which has restricted the development of automatic diagnostic techniques for ultrasound images, especially for the breast ultrasound images. This necessitates the need to choose an optimal speckle filtering algorithm for the specific clinical application with different required criteria. In this paper, the study focuses on the comparison of despeckle filters for the breast ultrasound images. Firstly, the models of speckle noise for medical ultrasound images are discussed. After that, eleven despeckle filters which are classified into five categories (local adaptive filter, anisotropic diffusion filter, multi-scale filter, nonlocal means filter, and hybrid filter) are described. Then, the comparative experiments of eleven despeckle filters for the two types of simulated images and clinical ultrasound breast images are presented. Finally, to objectively and systematically compare the performance of eleven despeckle filters, several comparison methods are used, such as the full-reference image quality metrics, the nonreference/blind image quality metrics, observing the removed noise images, as well as the visual evaluation of experts.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that help greatly to improve the manuscript. The authors would also like to thank the people who provide the MATLAB code or executable file, especially Karl Krissian for his OSRAD filter, Sara Parrilli for her SAR-BM3-D filter, and Anish Mittal for his NIQE evaluator. The work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60974042).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, No. 288, Liuhe Road, Xihu District, Hangzhou , 310032, People’s Republic of China

    Ju Zhang & Chen Wang

  2. Department of Ultrasound, Zhejiang Hospital, No. 12 Lingyin Road, Xihu District, Hangzhou , 310013, People’s Republic of China

    Yun Cheng

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  1. Ju Zhang
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Correspondence to Yun Cheng.

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Zhang, J., Wang, C. & Cheng, Y. Comparison of Despeckle Filters for Breast Ultrasound Images. Circuits Syst Signal Process 34, 185–208 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-014-9829-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-014-9829-y

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