Ultrasound speckle reduction via L0minimization

Lei Zhu, Weiming Wang, Xiaomeng Li, Qiong Wang, Jing Qin, Kin Hong Wong, Pheng Ann Heng

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

However, most of existing speckle reduction filters concentrate the blurring near features and introduced the hole artifacts, making the subsequent processing procedures complicated. Optimization-based methods can globally distribute such blurring, leading to better feature preservation. Motivated by this, we propose a novel optimization framework based on L0minimization for feature preserving ultrasound speckle reduction. We observed that the GAP, which integrates gradient and phase information, is extremely sparser in despeckled images than in speckled images. Based on this observation, we propose the L0minimization framework to remove speckle noise and simultaneously preserve features in ultrasound images. It seeks for the L0sparsity of the GAP values, and such sparsity is achieved by reducing small GAP values to zero in an iterative manner. Since features have larger GAP magnitudes than speckle noise, the proposed L0minimization is capable of effectively suppressing the speckle noise. Meanwhile, the rest of GAP values corresponding to prominent features are kept unchanged, leading to better preservation of those features. In addition, we propose an efficient and robust numerical scheme to transform the original intractable L0minimization into several sub-optimizations, from which we can quickly find their closed-form solutions. Experiments on synthetic and clinical ultrasound images demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art despeckling methods in terms of noise removal and feature preservation.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Vision - 13th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV 2016, Revised Selected Papers
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages50-65
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783319541860
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2017

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10113 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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