Performance Evaluation of Various Filtering Techniques for Speckle Suppression in Ultrasound Images

A.Mohanapreethi, Dr. V. SrinivasaRaghavan M.E, Communication Systems, Loyola Institute of Technology 2 Chennai, India 2 . Abstract─In diagnosis of diseases, ultrasound imaging is the most commonly used imaging system in medical field. The main issue related to this imaging technique is the presence of speckle noise which degrades the quality of the image. Image denoising is an important pre-processing task, before further processing of image like segmentation, feature extraction etc. This work investigates some of the filtering techniques used in smoothing or suppression of speckle noise and edge preservation in ultrasound images. This work proposes different hybrid filtering techniques for removal of speckle noise from ultrasound images. The key point in effective speckle removal is balance between speckle suppression and feature preservation, which is achieved by using hybrid filtering techniques. Performance evaluations are performed by using statistical parameters like Mean Square Error(MSE), Signal to Noise Ratio(SNR), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio(PSNR), Speckle Index (SI) and Edge Preservation Index (EPI).