Speckle noise removing and edge detection in ultrasonic images

초음파 영상에서의 스페클 잡음 제거 및 에지 검출

In this paper, variable windowing mean filter to remove speckle noise and a measure to detect thin edge in ultrasonic images are proposed. Because ultrasonic images are corrupted by speckle noise showing a granular appearance, good edge detection is difficult. As a result, noise removing filter is needed in preprocessing stage. The speckle noise removing filter is based on mean filter whose window size is changed by the ratio of standard deviation to mean for image signal and noise signal in local area. And the measure expressed the difference of means between tow windows is used for detecting thin edge in filtered image. Results show that variable windowing mean filter removes speckle noise effectively, and proposed measure is useful in detecting thin edge.