An Adaptive Data-Fitting Model for Speckle Reduction of Log-Compressed Ultrasound Images

Abstract

A good statistical model of speckle formation is useful to design a good speckle reduction model for clinical ultrasound images. We propose a new general dis-tribution to describe the distribution of speckle in clinical ultrasound images accord-ing to a log-compression algorithm of clinical ultrasound imaging. A new variational model is designed to remove the speckle noise with the proposed general distribution. The efficiency of the proposed model is confirmed by experiments on synthetic images and real ultrasound images. Compared with previous variational methods which as-sign a designated distribution, the proposed method is adaptive to remove different kinds of speckle noise by estimating parameters to find suitable distribution. The ex-periments show that the proposed method can adaptively remove different types of speckle noise.

Keywords

Clinical ultrasound images / general distribution / speckle / adaptive