Feature Asymmetry Anisotropic Diffusion for Speckle Reduction

	Feature Asymmetry Anisotropic Diffusion for Speckle Reduction
	Lei Zhu; Fei Gao; Weiming Wang; Qiong Wang; Jing Qin; Ying Zhao; Fangfang Zhou; Hai Zhang; Pheng-Ann Heng
刊名	JOURNAL OF MEDICAL IMAGING AND HEALTH INFORMATICS
	2017
文献子类	期刊论文
英文摘要	Ultrasonography has been increasingly used in clinical diagnosis and therapy, but doctors suffer great difficulties in interpreting ultrasound data due to the speckle that severely degrades the image quality. In this paper, we propose to reduce speckle noise in ultrasound images using feature asymmetry anisotropic diffusion (FAAD). The proposed approach is an adaptive diffusion process that can preserve image features while suppressing the noise by incorporating a local phase-based edge detector, called feature asymmetry (FA), into the forward-and-backward diffusion. Unlike intensity-based operators, the FA measure is theoretically intensity invariant and it can effectively discriminate the edges from noise even if they have similar gradient response. This property is very essential for the subsequent diffusion process because it supervises FAAD to perform the forward diffusion in speckled regions for noise removal and inhibit smoothing on the edges with different image intensities, resulting in better preservation of low contrast edges. Meanwhile, the backward diffusion in our FAAD can better protect intensity contrasts of features by reserving the diffusion process happened at features. In addition, the parameters involved are automatically computed in order to enhance the robustness of the proposed approach so that it can be adapted to different images without repetitive parameter tuning. We validate the proposed approach on clinical ultrasound images and compare segmentation accuracies on despeckled results. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs better than state-of-the-art despeckling methods in terms of speckle reduction and edge preservation.
URL标识	查看原文
语种	英语
内容类型	期刊论文
源URL	[http://ir.siat.ac.cn:8080/handle/172644/11586]
专题	深圳先进技术研究院_集成所
作者单位	JOURNAL OF MEDICAL IMAGING AND HEALTH INFORMATICS
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Lei Zhu,Fei Gao,Weiming Wang,et al. Feature Asymmetry Anisotropic Diffusion for Speckle Reduction[J]. JOURNAL OF MEDICAL IMAGING AND HEALTH INFORMATICS,2017.
APA	Lei Zhu.,Fei Gao.,Weiming Wang.,Qiong Wang.,Jing Qin.,...&Pheng-Ann Heng.(2017).Feature Asymmetry Anisotropic Diffusion for Speckle Reduction.JOURNAL OF MEDICAL IMAGING AND HEALTH INFORMATICS.
MLA	Lei Zhu,et al."Feature Asymmetry Anisotropic Diffusion for Speckle Reduction".JOURNAL OF MEDICAL IMAGING AND HEALTH INFORMATICS (2017).