Escaping path approach for speckle noise reduction

Abstract

A novel fast filtering technique for multiplicative noise removal in ultrasound images was presented in this paper. The proposed algorithm utilizes concept of digital paths created on the image grid presented in [1]adapted to the needs of multiplicative noise reduction. The new approach uses special type of digital paths so called Escaping Path Model and modified path length calculation based on topological as well as gray-scale distances. The experiments confirmed that the proposed algorithm achieves a comparable results with the existing state-of-theart denoising schemes in suppressing multiplicative noise in ultrasound images.