ISBN: 978-15-076833-85

Proceedings of International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering & Technology

Date: 24.1.2015

SPECKLE NOISE REDUCTION WITH EDGE PRESERVATION IN MEDICAL

ULTRASOUND IMAGES USING COMBINED TV AND WT METHOD
A.Karthikeyan1, V.vidyalakshmi2
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering,
Velammal engineering college, Chennai.
Kamalkarthikeyan91@gmail.com1
Vidhyalakshmivec2010@gmail.com2
Abstract A novel scheme for speckle noise reduction using Total variation(TV) and wavelet thresholding method(WT) in medical
ultrasound images. Ultrasound images is widely used and safe medical diagnostic technique, due to its invasive nature,low cost,
capability of forming real time imaging, and the continuing improvement in image quality. However, the usefulness of ultrasound
imaging is degraded by the presence of signal dependent noise known as speckle. In this paper,we propose a new method for speckle
reduction and coherence enhancement of ultrasound images based on a combined totalvariation(TV)and wavelet thresholding(WT)
methods. By using this method, a noisy image is decomposed into four subbands in wavelet domain. The low frequency subband
contains the low frequency coefficients with less noise that can be easily eliminated using TV-based method. More edges and other
detailed information like textures are contained in the other three subbannds and the wavelet threshold method is applied on these
three subbands. At last we use TV method to get final denoised image since the total variation method (tv)has the ability of
preserving edges. The proposed new method is compared with previous methods in terms of noise parameters.
Keyword: Ultrasound image, Total Variation, wavelet threshold, Speckle noise.

I INTRODUCTION
Speckle is generally a complex phenomenon, a form of multiplicative which reduces the detectability of targeted
organ and generally reduces the contrast of the image. Generally the presence of speckle noise makes confusion in identifying
the normal and affected tissues. Image Restoration is an area that deals with improving the appearance of the image. However
unlike, enhancement, image restoration is objective ,in the sense that restoration techniques tend to be based on mathematical
or probabilistic models of image degradation. Enhancement is based on human subjective preferences regarding a good
enhancement result. The best example is contrast sketching, that is considered an enhancement technique because it is
primarily on the pleasing aspects and it might present to the viewer, where as removal of image blur by applying a deblurring
function is considered a restoration technique. Image restoration is the operation of taking a corrupted noisy image and
estimating the clean original image. Corruption may come in many forms such as motion blur, noise, camera misfocus. Image
restoration likewise image enhancement attempts at improving the image quality. some overlap exists between image
enhancement and restoration. Important difference is image enhancement is largely subjective, while image restoration is
mainly objective process. Restoration techniques involve modeling of degradation and applying the inverse process in order to
recover the image. The restoration approach usually involves a criterion that will involve some goodness (e.g.,mean squared
error, smoothness, minimal description, length) that will yield an optimal estimate of the desired result. Even though speckle
noise is a random process, it has some properties also. The statistical properties of the speckle noise are useful in
differentiating the normal and pathological tissues. However noise is the random, backround events which have to be dealt
with in every system processing real signals. They are not part of the ideal signal and may be caused by the wide range of
resources. It is also possible to treat irrelevant scene details as if they were image noise. The characteristics of noise depends
on their source, as does the operator which best reduces their effects. Many image processing packages contain operators to
artificially add noise to an image. Deliberately corrupting an image with noise allows us to test the resistance of an image
processing operator to noise and assess the noise filter.

IAETSD 2015: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

www.iaetsd.in

43

ISBN: 978-15-076833-85
Proceedings of International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering & Technology

Date: 24.1.2015

Fig.1 Structure of kidney

Ultrasound imaging is one of the best technology used for many years is used for organ and soft tissue imaging. It is
widely preferred due to its advantages like non-invsive nature, low cost,and the ability to forming real time imaging.
Ultrasound imaging is mainly used in medical field that it mainly focus the detection of affected tissues. ultrasound imaging
plays a key role in detection of kidney malfunctions and diseases and mainly in detection of end-stage renal disease(ESRD).It
also used to estimate kidney size, position and appearance by which it helps to identify the abnormalities in the human kidney
and detect the presence of stones, swelling, congenital anomalies. Ultrasound imaging also used to detect the kidney cancer
and blockage of urine flow. But due to the presence of speckle noise, detection of any disorders in the kidney becomes very
difficult. Ultrasound images also used to determine several disorders such as the amount of fluid retained in a patients
bladder. In young males,it is used to distinguish more benign testicular masses from testicular cancer, which is highly curable
but which must be treated to preserve health and fertility. Ultrasound imaging of pelvic floor in human can produce important
diagnostic information regarding the precise relationship of abnormal structures with other pelvic organs and it represents a
useful hint to treat patients with symptoms related to pelvic prolapse, double incontinence and obstructed defecation and is
used to diagonise the kidney stones and kidney crystals. Ultrasound Image is produced by a piezoelectric transducer encased in
a plastic housing. Strong, short electrical pulses from the ultrasound machine drive the transducer at the desired frequency.The
frequency can be anywhere between 1and 18mhz.Older technology transducers focus their beams with physical lenses. Newer
technology transducers use phased array techniques to enable the ultrasound machine to change the direction and depth of the
focus.Ultrasonic energy was first applied to the human body for medical purposes by Dr.George Ludwig at the Naval medical
research institute,Bethesda,Maryland in the late 1940s.Ultrasound Image is routinely used in the emergency department to
expedite the care of patients with right upper quadrant abnominal pain who may have gallstones or cholecystitis. Endoanal
Ultrasound is used particularly in the investigation of anorectal symptoms such as obstructed defecation. It images the
immediate perianal anatomy and is able to detect the defects such as tearing of tissues. Kidney stones are also called as renal
calculus is a solid concretion or crystal aggregation formed in the kidneys from minerals in the urine. The diagonosis of kidney
stones is based on the information obtained from the history,Physical examination,urinalysis and Radiograhic studies. Urinary
Stones are typically classified by their location in the kidney,ureter or bladder or by their chemical composition.Ultrasound
image is one such technique that are considered very effective for these kind of kidney stone analysis.But the presence of noise
called speckle degrades the speed and occuracy,therefore speckle noise is considered as dominant noise in ultrasound imaging
and it is very important to handle these noise in a effective maaner,in the sense without sacrificing some important features and
edges.Generally the presence of speckle noise leads to reduce the contrast resolutions and contributes to a lower signal-to-noise
ratio and thereby leads to reducing the ability to detect objects of size comparable to its own size.Mainly for reducing the
speckle noises,various denoising techniques have been developed to improve the quality of ultrasound imaging with each one
has its own advantages and disadvantages.
This paper describes the combined approach i.e total variation and wavelet thresholding methods to resolve the
contradiction between speckle noise suppression and texture and edge preserving techniques. The Ultrasound image is taken
by the diagnosis center and the database called IBE Tech in cairo,Egypt and later performing Discrete Wavelet transform for
the speckle noisy image taken. After performing Discrete Wavelet Transform the image is undergone with partition of several
subbands and the step-wise image processing methods and followed by total variation and wavelet thresholding method.
Statistical parameters are estimated and then we can be seen how effectively speckle noise is reduced compared to previous
methods.
II RELATED WORKS
A deal with the basic structure of speckle noise is associated with the kidneys ultrasound image. Then it is followed by the
existing image processing methods involved in it in order to find the severity and then about the proposed methodology based
on literature survey. Gregorio Andria,Filippo Attivissimo,Anna M.L.Lanzolla proposed anovel parametric thresholding
procedure to reduce the effect of speckle noise in Ultrasound(US)medical images.This method comprises the use of an

IAETSD 2015: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

www.iaetsd.in

44

ISBN: 978-15-076833-85
Proceedings of International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering & Technology

Date: 24.1.2015

adaptive data-driven exponential operator that operates on wavelet coefficients of the US image to suppress undesired aspects
of disturbances,preserving signal details[1]. Oleg v.Michailovich and Allen Tannenbaum proposes a simple preprocessing
procedure,which modified the acquired radio-frequency images,so the noise in the log-transformation domain become very
close in its behavior to a white Gaussian noise.They also evaluates performances of three different,non linear filters-wavelet
denoising,total variation filtering,and anisotropic diffusion and demonstrates that,in all these cases,the proposed preprocy of
the resultant images.significantly[2].Yongjian Yu and Scott.T demonstrates the derivation of the speckle reducing anisotropic
diffusion (SRAD),a diffusion method tailored to ultrasonic and radar imaging applications.SRAD is the edge-sensitive
diffusion for speckled images, in the same way that conventional anisotropic diffusion is the edge-sensitive diffusion for
lmages corrupted with additive noise.SRAD exploits the instantaneous coefficient of variation,which is shown to be a function
of the local gradient magnitude and laplacian or operators.They validate the new algorithm using both synthetic and real linear
scan ultrasonic imaginery of the carotid artery.They also demonstrates the algorithm performance with real SAR data.The
performance measures obtained by means of computer simulation of carotid artery images are compared with three existing
speckle reduction schemes.In the presence of speckle noise,speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion excels over the tradional
speckle removal filters and over the conventional anisotropic diffusion method in terms of mean preservation, variance
reduction and edge localization[3].S.Sudha,G.R.Suresh and R.Sukanesh proposed a novel thresholding algorithm for denoising
speckle in ultrasound with wavelets. They Favor their approach by Bayes shrinkage function. They also demonstrated
ultrasound based diagnostic medical imaging technique used to visualize muscles and many internal organs,their size,structure
and any pathological injuries with real time tomographic images.It is also used to visualize a fetus during routine and
emergency prenatal care.They also done the statistical analysis for carrying out the statistical test in the wavelet domain that
require an inverse wavelet transform [4].This method provides high diagonostic values and highly works in the aim of
suppressing the speckle in Ultrasound images.

III METHODLOGY
This paper is based on a combined method of Total variation(TV) and wavelet thresholding(WT).The proposed combined
algorithm is applied for the ultrasound images that has been taken the IBE Tech database at the cairo,Egypt for collecting the
kidneys ultrasound images.First of all,the noisy image is divided into several subbands by applying the Discrete Wavelet
Transform,the divided subbands by applying discrete wavelet transform are LL(low-low), LH(low-high), HH(high-high) and
HL(high-low).The divided subbands are treated carefully and it follows a step-wise process which is represented in the block
diagram below. The objective of this paper is to ultimately reduce the speckle noise in the ultrasound images with preserving
important features like edges and estimate the parameters in order to measure accuracy. It does not require pathology
modeling and allows high degree of automation. The overall method proposed here is to detect the speckle noise and reduce
the speckle noise with the good preservation of edges. It applies digital image processing concepts in the field of medical
science.

Noisy
Image

DWT

LL

LH, HL,
HH

Total
Variation

Wavelet
Shrinkage
Rule

Modified
LH, HL, HH

Inverse
DWT
Parameters
Evaluation

Denoised
Image

TV

Fig.2. Block diagram of proposed model

A. Discrete Wavelet Transform

Generally Discrete Wavelet Transform is an wavelet transform for which the wavelets are discretely sampled.The
key advantage that it has over the other transforms is Temporal Resolution.since it captures both frequency and location
information it has various advantages over other transforms.The DWT of a signal x is calculated by passing it through a series

IAETSD 2015: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

www.iaetsd.in

45

ISBN: 978-15-076833-85
Proceedings of International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering & Technology

Date: 24.1.2015

of filters.First,the samples are passed through a lowpass filter with impulse response g resulting in the convolution of the two
functions.It can be represented as

Y[n]=(x*g)[n]= x[k] g[n-k]

k=-
The Signal is decomposed simultaneously using high-pass and low-pass filter.the outputs giving detailed
coefficients(from the high-pass filter) and approximation coefficients(from the low-pass filter).It is very important that the two
filters are related to each other.The filter outout coefficients are generally subsampled by 2. It can be represented as

Ylow[n]= x[k] h[2n-k]

K=-

Yhigh[n]= x[k] g[2n-k]

K=-
Now Discrete Wavelet Transform is applied for the speckle noised ultrasound image of kidney and it divides the subbands
LL,LH,HH,HL as in fig. 3a and fig.3b.

Fig.3a. Original speckle noised image

Fig.3b. After applying DWT

B.Total Variation Method

After applying Discrete Wavelet Transform to the image, the image is divided into several subbands and we exclusively
take LL subannds and we apply total variation method to that band in order to preserve sharp edges.since the LL subbannds
have information at low frequencies,total variation method is exploited.Because of its ability of preserving sharp edges,it is
widely used in many applications of image processing. Based on the partial differential equation based(PDE)scheme,the original
image is restored,which is highly intensive. The simple chambolles projection algorithm to solve PDE based scheme is given as
U=f PG(f)
Where f is the noisy image.
U is the image we want to restore from f.
PG(f) is the orthogonal projection of f on G on space G.

IAETSD 2015: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

www.iaetsd.in

46

ISBN: 978-15-076833-85
Proceedings of International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering & Technology

Date: 24.1.2015

C.Wavelet Thresholding Method

Generally,wavelet thresholding also called as wavelet shrinkage is one of the filtering technique for image denoising.In
common,wavelet thresholding consists of three basics steps
i)Calculate the DWT for the noisy image
ii)Threshold the wavelet coefficients.
iii)Re-construction of the image by computing the IDWT.
The two most common types of thresholding are
1)soft thresholding and
2)Hard thresholding.
Soft thresholding is normally used over hard thresholding images because hard thresholding is highly vulnerable to noise.
Soft thresholding is expressed as
2(w)= (w-sgn(w)T)I(w>T)
where w is wavelet coefficient,T is threshold whereas
hard thresholding is expressed as
1(w)= wI(w>T
D.Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform
Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transform is used to obtain wavelet coefficients of the reconstructed image.It is generally
a reverse of the Discrete Wavelet Transform and mainly useful to reconstruction of several subbands of an image.The twodimensional DWT converts images from spatial domain to frequency domain.At each level of the decomposition,each column
of the image is first transformed using a 1D vertical analysis filter bank.One level of wavelet decomposition produces four
filtered and subsampled images which is normally referred to as subbands.

LL band after applying TV

method

LH band after applyingWT

method

HH band after applying WT

method

HH band after applying WT

method

Fig. 4. Ultrasound kidney image after applying TV and WT method

E. Parameter Evaluation
To Estimate the qulity of the reconstructed ,the quality of reconstructed image is measured in terms of mean square
error(MSE) and peak signal to noise ratio(PSNR)ratio.The MSE is often called reconstruction error varaiance q2. The MSE
between original image f and the reconstructed image g at decoder is defined as
MSE= q2 =1/N (f[j,k] g[j,k])2
j,k

IAETSD 2015: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

www.iaetsd.in

47

ISBN: 978-15-076833-85
Proceedings of International Conference on Recent Innovations in Engineering & Technology

Date: 24.1.2015

The PSNR between two imges having 8 bits per pixel in terms of decibels (dBs)is given by
PSNR=10log10 (2552/MSE)

Fig 5. Denoised speckle ultrasound image of kidney

IV CONCLUSION

The aim of this proposal is to develop a new featured algorithm to detect and reduce the speckle noise. Work carried out
consists of various image processing steps such as Discrete Wavelet Transform, Total Variation and Wavelet Thresholding.
From the literature analysis a comparative study of various works are carried out in reducing the speckle noise are analyzed.
The best methods generating a very good performance are chosen in this work in order to build a better automated algorithm.
This analysis is done based on better sensitivity and specificity to ensure high accuracy of the denoised image.
REFERENCES
[1]Gregorio Andria,Filippo Attivissimo,Anna M.L Lanzolla Suitable
Threshold for Speckle Reduction in Ultrasound Images, IEEE Transactions
On Instrumentation And Measurement.vol.no.52,2013.
[2]Oleg v.michailovich and Allen Tannenbaum Despeckling Of Medical Ultrasound ImagesIEEE transactions on ultrasonics and frequency
control,vol.53,January 2006.
[3]Y. Yongjian and S. T. Acton, Speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion. IEEE Trans. Image Processing 11, p.p 1260 (2002).
[4]S.Sudha,G.R.Suresh and R.Sukanesh Speckle noise reduction in ultrasound images by wavelet thresholding based on a weighted varianceInternational
Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering,vol.1,April 2009.
[5] S. Schulte, M. Nachtegael, V. De Witte, D. Van der Weken, E.E. Kerre, A Fuzzy Impulse Noise Detection and Reduction Method, IEEE Transactions on
Image Processing, Vol 15, Issue 5, May 2006, pp. 1153 - 1162.
[6]W. Luo, An Efficient Detail-Preserving Approach for Removing Impulse Noise in Images, IEEE Transactions on Siganl Processing , Vol 13, No 7, July
2006, pp. 413-416.
[7] W. Luo, Efficient Removal of Impulse Noise from Digital Images, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 52, No. 2, May 2006, pp. 523-527.
[8] Huang, G. Yang, and G. Tang, A fast two-dimensional median filtering algorithmIEEE Transactions on Acoust.ic Speech Signal Processing 27, 13
(1979).
[9]Wang and D. Zhang, Progressive switching median filter for the removal of impulse noise from highly corrupted images, IEEE Transactions on Circuits
Systemsand Analog Digit. Signal Process. Pp.78-80, 1999.
[10]S. J. Ko and Y. H. Lee, Center weighted median filters and their applications to image enhancementInternational journal of Pattern Recognition Pp.341347, 1994.
[11] E.Abreu, M.Lightstone, S.Mitra, and K. Arakawa, A new efficient approach for the removal of impulse noise from highly corrupted images, IEEE
Transaction on Image Processing , pp.1012-1025,1996.
[12] Shuqun Zhang and Mohammad A. Karim, A new impulse detector for switching median filters, IEEE Trans on Image Processing, pp.234- 237, 2004.

IAETSD 2015: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

www.iaetsd.in

48