Fast reduction of speckle noise in real ultrasound images

In this paper, we concentrate on fast removing speckle noise in real ultrasound images. It is hard to design a fast algorithm to solve a speckle reduction model, since the data fitting term in a speckle reduction model is usually not convex. In this paper, we present a convex variational model to deal with speckle noise in real ultrasound images. The data-fitting term of the proposed model is obtained by using a generalized Kullback-Leibler distance. To fast solve the proposed model, we incorporate variable splitting method and Bregman iterative method to propose a fast ultrasound speckle reduction algorithm. The capability of the proposed method is shown both on synthetic images and real ultrasound images. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.