Speckle De-noising with Local Oriented Structure for Edge Preservation in Ultrasound Images

This paper proposes a local oriented structural information based scheme for developing weighted total variation mechanism to despeckle B-mode ultrasound images. This weighing mechanism is devised with a goal to preserve the structures present in the image while yielding a piecewise smoothness in the restored version. To achieve this goal, the weights are computed based on the direction of the geometry of the organs present in the image. The use of oriented structural information helps to control the smoothing around the edges depending on the direction instead of inhibiting it near the edges. Using two radiometric measurements, the developed algorithm’s performance is compared to those of state-of-the-art algorithms. It has been observed from the results that the proposed algorithm attains better piecewise smoothness and high contrast in the restored images. Along with it, the structures are conserved in de-speckled images. The performance of the proposed algorithms can be corroborated from the qualitative and quantitative analysis.