• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.475-484
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• 2023

This study aimed to compare filters for reducing speckle noise in ultrasound images using clinical liver images. We acquired the clinical liver ultrasound images, and noisy images were obtained by adding 0.01, 0.05, 0.10, and 0.50 intensity levels of speckle noise to the liver images. The Wiener filter, median modified Wiener filter, gamma filter, and Lee filter were designed for the noisy images by setting window sizes at 3×3, 5×5, and 7×7. The coefficient of variation (COV) and contrast to noise ratio (CNR) were calculated to evaluate noise reduction and various filters. Moreover, the filter with the highest image quality was selected and quantitatively compared to a noisy image. As a result, COV and CNR showed the noise improved result when the Lee filter was applied. Furthermore, the Lee filter image with a window size of 7×7 was noted to possess approximately a minimum of 1.28 to a maximum of 3.38 times better COV and a minimum of 2.18 to a maximum of 5.50 times better CNR than the noisy image. In conclusion, we confirmed that the Lee filter was effective in reducing speckle noise and proved that an appropriate window size needs to be set considering blurring.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.1-9
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• 2008

Thanks to the multimedia technology development, it is possible to show image representations in high quality and to process images in various ways. Anisotropic diffusion as an effective diffusion filtering among many image preprocessing methods and postprocessing methods is used in reduction of speckle noises of ultrasound images, image restoration, edge detection, and image segmentation. However, the conventional anisotropic diffusion based on a cross-kernel causes the following problems. The problem is the concentration of edges in the vertical or horizontal directions. In this paper, a new anisotropic diffusion transform based on directions of gradient is proposed. The proposed method uses the eight directional square-kernel which is an expanded form of the cross-kernel. The proposed method is to select directions of small gradient based on square-kernel. Therefore, the range of proposed diffusion is selected adaptively according to the number of the directions of gradient. Experimental results show that the proposed method can decrease the concentration of edges in the vertical or horizontal directions, remove impulse noise. The image in high quality can be obtained as a result of the proposed method.