3D cluster-driven trilateral filter for speckle reduction in ultrasound images

Abstract

We propose a cluster-driven trilateral filter for speckle reduction in ultrasound images. In addition to operating in the spatial dimension and the intensity dimension, the proposed filter also merges clustering information simultaneously. We compare the proposed filter with a normalized bilateral filter for speckle reduction using real 3-D ultrasound images. Our experimental results indicate that the cluster-driven trilateral filter exhibits better performance for speckle reduction and edge feature preservation than the normalized bilateral filter. In addition, we investigate the graphic processing unit (GPU) technique and apply it to the proposed 3-D filter. We design and test a GPU framework and compare it with a single-core CPU framework. Our experimental results show that the GPU-accelerated trilateral filter can obtain a roughly 20-fold increase in speed.