Block Based thresholding in Wavelet Domain for Denoising Ultrasound Medical Images

Medical ultrasound imaging has transformed the disease identification in the human body in the last few decades. The major setback for ultrasound medical images is speckle noise. Speckle noise is created in ultrasound images due to numerous reflections of ultrasound signals from hard tissues of human body. Speckle noise corrupts the medical ultrasound images dropping the detectable quality of the image. An endeavor is made to recover the image quality of ultrasound medical images by using block based hard and soft thresholding of wavelet coefficients. Medical ultrasound image is transformed to wavelet domain using debauchee's mother wavelet. Divide the approximate and detailed coefficients into uniform blocks of size 8x8, 16x16, 32x32 and 64x64. Hard and soft thresholding on these blocks of approximate and detailed coefficients are applied. Inverse transformation to original spatial domain produces a noise reduced ultrasound image. Experiments were conducted on medical ultrasound images obtained from diagnostic centers in Vijayawada, India. Quality of improved images in measured using peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), image quality index (IQI), structural similarity index (SSIM).