Speckle reduction with edges preservation for ultrasound images: using function spaces approach

Abstract

In this study, a novel speckle reduction method is proposed for ultrasound images. This denoising method is designed to preserve both the edges and structural details of the image. Speckle noise is suppressed, without smearing the edges, by extending the smoothness of the image in the wavelet-based Hölder spaces. A comparison of smoothing speckles with the other well-known methods is provided via the size of Besov norm. The authors validate the proposed method using synthetic data, simulated and real ultrasound images. Experiments demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods in terms of image quality and edge preservation indices.