Evaluation of Digital Speckle Filters for Ultrasound Images

Ultrasound (US) images are inherently corrupted by speckle noise causing inaccuracy of medical diagnosis using this technique. Hence, numerous despeckling filters are used to denoise US images. However most of the despeckling techniques cause blurring to the US images. In this work, four filters namely Lee, Wavelet Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE), Speckle-reduction Anisotropic Diffusion (SRAD) and Non-local-means (NLM) filters are evaluated in terms of their ability in noise removal and capability to preserve the image contrast. This is done through calculating four performance metrics Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Ultrasound Despeckling Assessment Index (USDSAI), Normalized Variance and Mean Preservation. The experiments were conducted on three different types of images which is simulated noise images, computer generated image and real US images. The evaluation in terms of PSNR, USDSAI, Normalized Variance and Mean Preservation shows that NLM filter is the best filter in all scenarios considering both speckle noise suppression and image restoration however with quite slow processing time. It may not be the best option of filter if speed is the priority during the image processing. Wavelet LMMSE filter is the next best performing filter after NLM filter with faster speed.