Title: An advanced wavelet decomposition based denoising technique for de-speckling of all ultrasound images

Authors: Mayank Kumar Singh; Indu Saini; Neetu Sood

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar Punjab, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar Punjab, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar Punjab, India

Abstract: The ultrasound (US) image is well known for accessibility and low cost. Most importantly it is the only diagnostic technique which is radiation free. But, the presence of speckle noise, thoroughly limits its application for diagnosis. This paper aims to remove the noise using wavelet transformation. The US were transformed using discrete wavelet transform after log transformation. A threshold was obtained using the estimated noise variance for each sub-band. A multi-scale thresholding function was proposed to increase the thresholding flexibility. A large range of US were used (12,400, 926, 780, and 1,000 images of foetus, liver, breast and synthetic images respectively) to evaluate the performance. When compared with other thresholding techniques the proposed method has shown a maximum improvement of 172%, 340%, and 380% in peak signal to noise ratio, mean square error, and structural similarity index. With the referenceless metrics our technique has shown 47% improvement in US quality.

Keywords: denoising; speckle noise; ultrasound images; wavelet transformation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBET.2024.136373

International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, 2024 Vol.44 No.1, pp.47 - 63

Received: 11 Oct 2022
Accepted: 01 Feb 2023
Published online: 31 Jan 2024 *

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