Optimally Discriminant Moments for Speckle Detection in Real B-Scan Images

Detection of speckle in ultrasound (US) images has been regarded as an important research topic in US imaging, mainly focusing on two specific applications: improving signal to noise ratio by removing speckle noise and, secondly, for detecting speckle patches in order to perform a 3D reconstruction based on speckle decorrelation measures. A novel speckle detection proposal is presented here showing that detection can be improved based on finding optimally discriminant low order speckle statistics. We describe a fully automatic method for speckle detection and propose and validate a framework to be efficiently applied to real B-scan data, not being published to date. Quantitative and qualitative results are provided, both for real and simulated data. 1 Background US imaging captures the difference of sound scattering and reflection in tissues. Taking into account spatially randomly distributed sub-resolution scatterers, one can talk about incoherent scattering which gives rise to sp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IBPRIA
• Authors: Robert Marti, Joan Martí, Jordi Freixenet, Joan Carles Vilanova, Joaquim Barceló
• Keywords: IBPRIA 2007, Image, Image Analysis, Speckle, Speckle Detection, Speckle Noise