Ultrasound Speckle Reduction Based on Image Segmentation and Diffused Region Growing

This paper presents an adaptive speckle reduction method through diffused growing region filtering based on image segmentation. The main idea is to smooth the speckle regions adaptively and preserve the edge and tissue structure. The criterion of speckle region is defined from a similarity value obtained from histogram matching between the histogram in the processing window and a reference one derived from a speckle area. Then the whole image will be classified into five categories according to the similarity values and other tissue characteristics, followed by speckle reduction processing in diffused growing region covering the same structure categories.