JOINT BAYESIAN DECONVOLUTION AND POINT SPREAD FUNCTION ESTIMATION FOR ULTRASOUND IMAGING

This paper addresses the problem of blind deconvolution for ultrasound images within a Bayesian framework. The prior of the unknown ultrasound image to be estimated is assumed to be a product of generalized Gaussian distributions. The point spread function of the system is also assumed to be unknown and is assigned a Gaussian prior distribution. These priors are combined with the likelihood function to build the joint posterior distribution of the image and PSF. However, it is difficult to derive closed-form expressions of the Bayesian estimators associated with this posterior. Thus, this paper proposes to build estimators of the unknown model parameters from samples generated according to the model posterior using a hybrid Gibbs sampler. Simulation results performed on synthetic data allow the performance of the proposed algorithm to be appreciated.