Speckle Reduction of Ultrasound Image Based on Contourlet Transform

Abstract

This paper presents a contourlet based approach for speckle reduction of ultrasound image. The discrete wavelet transform provides a transformation of a signal from the time domain to the scale-frequency domain. However, they do not handle high order singularities as well. Curvelets and ridgelets take the form of basis elements which exhibit very high directional sensitivity and high anisotropic. But, it is time consumption to digitize the curvelet transform. This will conduce to a serve limitation on curvelets in certain applications, such as ultrasound imaging and compression. The contourlet transform have a double iterated filter bank structure and a small redundancy at most 4/3. Based on contourlet transform, two thresholding methods are used. The experiment shows great promise for speckle reduction of breast ultrasound images.