AN ADAPTIVE SPECKLE SUPPRESSION FILTER FOR MEDICAL ULTRASONIC-IMAGING

An adaptive smoothing technique for speckle sup pression in medical B- scan ultrasonic imaging is presented, The technique is based on filter ing with appropriately shaped and sized local kernels. For each image pixel, a filtering kernel, which fits to the local homogeneous region containing the processed pixel, is obtained through a local statistics based region growing technique. Performance of the proposed filter ha s been tested on the phantom and tissue images, The results show that the filter effectively reduces the speckle while preserving the resolv able details. The simulation results are presented in a comparative wa y with two existing speckle suppression methods.