Medical Ultrasound Image Speckle Noise Reduction by Adaptive Median Filter

Medical ultrasound is a powerful nonivasive diagnostics tool. Due to physical factors of the diagnostics system, ultrasound generated images usually contain some noise where specle noise is often a prominent component. In this paper we propose an adaptive median filter with adaptive window size for removing speckle noise from ultrasound medical images, including the case when spots are larger than one pixel. Our proposed algorithm was tested on different ultrasound images and different evaluation metrics including mean square error, peak signal to ratio, normalized cross correlation, average difference, structural content, maximum difference, normalized absolute error and image enhancement factor were used as measure of the quality of noise removal. All these metrics have shown that the proposed method was successful. Key–Words: Ultrasound medical images, speckle noise, denoising, median filter.