Abstract
Despeckling of ultrasound images is essential for subsequent computational analysis. In this paper, an edge aware geometric filter (GF) is proposed for speckle reduction. The behaviour of conventional GF is approximated using commonly used functions like unit step. These approximations help in identifying the natural relationship between GF and other existing spatially adaptive filters. Subsequently, the modifications in GF framework are proposed to take the advantage of edge characteristics. The proposed filter requires almost no parameter tuning and provides good quality outputs for synthetic as well as real ultrasound images. It is compared with the state-of-the-art speckle reducing filters. Improvements of 10.46% and 42% are noticed in mean square error and figure of merit, respectively.
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We would like to acknowledge AKAB Healthcare Pvt. Ltd. for funding.
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Mishra, D., Chaudhury, S., Sarkar, M., Soin, A.S. (2017). Edge Aware Geometric Filter for Ultrasound Image Enhancement. In: Valdés Hernández, M., González-Castro, V. (eds) Medical Image Understanding and Analysis. MIUA 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 723. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60964-5_10
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