Wavelet-based ultrasound image denoising: performance analysis and comparison

Ultrasound images are generally affected by multiplicative speckle noise, which is mainly due to the coherent nature of the scattering phenomenon. Speckle noise filtering is thus a critical pre-processing step in medical ultrasound imaging provided that the diagnostic features of interest are not lost. A comparative study of the performance of alternative wavelet based ultrasound image denoising methods is presented in this article. In particular, the contourlet and curvelet techniques with dual tree complex and real and double density wavelet transform denoising methods were applied to real ultrasound images and results were quantitatively compared. The results show that curvelet-based method performs superior as compared to other methods and can effectively reduce most of the speckle noise content of a given image.