Adaptive speckle suppression and edge enhancement method based on Nakagami distribution

Ultrasonic images suffer from a special kind of noise called speckle. An adaptive speckle suppression and edge enhancement method based on Nakagami distribution is presented. An adaptive filter is designed by the Nakagami distribution model of speckle. The stick technique what utilizes sticks with different size and various orientations is applied to locally approximate certain linear features of image. The local region is a stick instead of a usual window, the orientation of sticks is decided by hypothesis test optimizing method and the length of sticks is concerned with local statistical feature of speckle. The effectiveness in speckle suppression and edge preservation and enhancement of the proposed filter is demonstrated on ultrasound images of prostate.