Speckle reduction of ultrasound medical images using Bhattacharyya distance in modified non-local mean filter

Abstract

Speckle, a multiplicative noise, is an inherent property of ultrasound imaging. It reduces the contrast and resolution of the ultrasound images. Thus, it creates a negative effect on image interpretation and diagnostic tasks. In this paper, a modified non-local means filter using Bhattacharyya distance is proposed. In the non-local mean, noise free pixel is estimated as a weighted mean of image pixels, where weights are calculated according to the similarity between image patches. Similarity between the patches is measured by comparing pixel intensities. In this work, instead of comparing pixel intensities for measuring similarities, blocks are used for measuring similarities based on Bhattacharyya distance. Quantitative results on both simulated and real ultrasound images show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to other well-known methods.

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