A Motion Compounding Technique for Speckle Reduction in Ultrasound Images |
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Authors: | Cheng-Hsien Lin Yung-Nien Sun Chii-Jeng Lin |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, Ta-Hsueh Road, Tainan, Taiwan, Republic of China;(2) Department of Orthopaedics, National Cheng Kung University Hospital, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, Republic of China; |
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Abstract: | The quality of ultrasound images is usually influenced by speckle noise and the temporal decorrelation of the speckle patterns.
To reduce the speckle noise, compounding techniques have been widely applied. Partially correlated images scanned on the same
subject cross-section are combined to generate a compound image with improved image quality. However, the compounding technique
might introduce image blurring if the transducer or the target moves too fast. This blurring effect becomes especially critical
when assessing tissue deformation in clinical motion examinations. In this paper, an ultrasound motion compounding system
is proposed to improve the quality of ultrasound motion sequences. The proposed motion compounding technique uses a hierarchical
adaptive feature weighted motion estimation method to realign the frames before compounding. Each frame is first registered
and warped to the reference frame before being compounded to reduce the speckle noise. Experimental results showed that the
motion could be assessed accurately and better visualization could be achieved for the compound images, with improved signal-to-noise
and contrast-to-noise ratios. |
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Keywords: | |
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