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Speckle Reduction and Structure Enhancement by Multichannel Median Boosted Anisotropic Diffusion

Abstract

We propose a new approach to reduce speckle noise and enhance structures in speckle-corrupted images. It utilizes a median-anisotropic diffusion compound scheme. The median-filter-based reaction term acts as a guided energy source to boost the structures in the image being processed. In addition, it regularizes the diffusion equation to ensure the existence and uniqueness of a solution. We also introduce a decimation and back reconstruction scheme to further enhance the processing result. Before the iteration of the diffusion process, the image is decimated and a subpixel shifted image set is formed. This allows a multichannel parallel diffusion iteration, and more importantly, the speckle noise is broken into impulsive or salt-pepper noise, which is easy to remove by median filtering. The advantage of the proposed technique is clear when it is compared to other diffusion algorithms and the well-known adaptive weighted median filtering (AWMF) scheme in both simulation and real medical ultrasound images.

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Correspondence to Zhi Yang.

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Yang, Z., Fox, M.D. Speckle Reduction and Structure Enhancement by Multichannel Median Boosted Anisotropic Diffusion. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2004, 615075 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1155/S1110865704402091

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/S1110865704402091

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