Adaptive Non-local Means Method for Speckle Reduction in Ultrasound Images

Noise removal is a crucial step to enhance the quality of ultrasound images. However, some existing despeckling methods cannot ensure satisfactory restoration performance. In this paper, an adaptive non-local means (ANLM) filter is proposed for speckle noise reduction in ultrasound images. The distinctive property of the proposed method lies in that the decay parameter will not take the fixed value for the whole image but adapt itself to the variation of the local features in the ultrasound images. In the proposed method, the pre-filtered image will be obtained using the traditional NLM method. Based on the pre-filtered result, the local gradient will be computed and it will be utilized to determine the decay parameter adaptively for each image pixel. The final restored image will be produced by the ANLM method using the obtained decay parameters. Simulations on the synthetic image show that the proposed method can deliver sufficient speckle reduction while preserving image details very well and it outperforms the state-of-the-art despeckling filters in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM). Experiments on the clinical ultrasound image further demonstrate the practicality and advantage of the proposed method over the compared filtering methods.