Despeckling Techniques for Ultrasound Images

Biomedical imaging shows a substantial role in the era for diagnosis of cancer. Ultrasound (US) imaging modality is widely used in comparison to other modalities for disease diagnosis because it not being or involve in invasive medical procedure. US is a real-time imaging modality, economically, reliable and not uses harmful radiation during the diagnosis. The noise present in US, reduces the visuality and quality of US images is called speckle noise. It degrades the fine details of US image which causes difficulty in effective feature calculation, analysis and edge detection. Speckle noise effects image interpretation and causes misdiagnosis due to bed quality of the images. Many speckle noise reduction techniques have been investigated by various researchers for noise free images. In this paper, a detailed overview about different despeckling filters is presented with different evaluation parameters. This study will help the researchers to select efficient despeckling technique for preprocessing of US images.