Ultrasound imaging is a fast, widespread, and essential diagnostic technique for examining the body’s internal
anatomy to find abnormal tissues or diseases. However, speckle noise in ultrasound imaging corrupts fine details
and edges and degrades the image’s resolution and contrast, making diagnosing more difficult. In this work, a
speckle reduction method using motion compounding is proposed. The objective of this work is ultrasound image
enhancement keeping all the diagnostics details and edges. The proposed method uses the pre-locations frames
that the sonographer generates before locating the required diagnostic frame. These frames are applied to the
proposed optimized Modified Three-Step Search (O-MTSS) algorithm to enhance the final processed frame. The
O-MTSS algorithm is a hybrid between the Three Step Search algorithm (TSS) and the New Diamond Search
Algorithm (NDS). The method requires a scoring layer for storing additional frames to select optimal frames that
will be used for enhancement. The proposed methodology is tested on synthetic and real ultrasound images. The
outcomes produce considerable speckle reduction while maintaining the image edges with good computational
time for real-time scanning. The result is evaluated by subjective physicians, radiologists, and image evaluation
metrics. According to the percentages of the subjective analysis, there is a remarkable improvement in the
processed image. The proposed algorithm result is compared with existing algorithms; It is observed that the
improvement in terms of signal to noise ratio, peak signal to noise ratio, mean square error, root mean square
error and structural similarity index values of the proposed method are 4.6%, 3.32%, 12.02%, 6.2% and 1.57%
respectively over Non-Local Low-Rank (NLLR) method. According to qualitative and quantitative analysis, the
suggested method outperforms existing speckle reduction techniques regarding edge and fine detail preservation. |
