Speckle Noise Reduction in Echocardiography Using a Bank of Filters Based on Oriented Structuring Elements

摘要

Speckle noise filtering has been investigated since at least fifty years, this multiplicative and granular interferencemay be found in any image, i.e, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), optical coherence tomography, and of course,medical ultrasound imaging. Speckle noise is produced by structural characteristics of materials, in case of theultrasound imaging case, by small structural irregularities. This work proposes a novel speckle noise filteringstrategy using a bank of morphological multi-scale filters that captures anisotropic information and additionallypreserves cardiac structures. This method is compared against commonly used filters, namely: AnisotropicDiffusion Filter (ADMSS), Non-Local Means Filter (NLMF) and Detail Preserving Anisotropic Diffusion Filter(DPAD).