Speckle appears in all conventional ultrasound images and is caused by
the use of a phase-sensitive transducer. Speckle is an undesirable pr
operty as it can mask small but perhaps diagnostically significant ima
ge features. In this paper a homomorphic, hybrid nonlinear processing
method, based on cancellation of scattering interference, is developed
and examined. Experiments with synthetic and real ultrasound imagery
show that the proposed method improves the contrast-to-noise ratio in
both lesion and cyst areas and preserves edge clarity.