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A Speckle Noise Removal Method

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Abstract

During formation of echocardiographic images, speckle noise is introduced, which diminishes important information present in an image and effects physician’s capability to interpret image correctly. In the literature, many techniques have been proposed to remove unwanted noise from the image. In this paper, an intelligent denoising algorithm for echocardiographic images has been proposed, which first divides input image into different regions, namely smooth, texture and edge, using coefficient of variation. Fuzzy logic is used to draw boundaries between these image regions. Average filter and fractional integral filters are deployed to denoise pixels of various regions. Selection of filter depends on the characteristics of a region. The proposed technique improves quality of denoised image by suppressing maximum noise and producing no artifacts. Simulation results show superiority of proposed methodology over state-of-the-art existing methodologies, visually and using quantitative measures i.e. mean square error, peak signal to noise, edge preservation index, correlation coefficient and structure similarity.

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Author notes

  1. Ayesha Saadia: Equal contributor.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Software Engineering, Military College of Signals, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Ayesha Saadia

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Military College of Signals, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Adnan Rashdi

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  1. Ayesha Saadia
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  2. Adnan Rashdi
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Correspondence to Ayesha Saadia.

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Saadia, A., Rashdi, A. A Speckle Noise Removal Method. Circuits Syst Signal Process 37, 2639–2650 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-017-0687-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-017-0687-2

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