Two dimensional cuckoo search optimization algorithm based despeckling filter for the real ultrasound images

Abstract

A clinical ultrasound imaging plays a significant role in the proper diagnosis of patients because, it is a cost-effective and non-invasive technique in comparison with other methods. The speckle noise contamination caused by ultrasound images during the acquisition process degrades its visual quality, which makes the diagnosis task difficult for physicians. Hence, to improve their visual quality, despeckling filters are commonly used for processing of such images. However, several disadvantages of existing despeckling filters discourage the use of existing despeckling filters to reduce the effect of speckle noise. In this paper, two dimensional cuckoo search optimization algorithm based despeckling filter is proposed for avoiding limitations of various existing despeckling filters. Proposed despeckling filter is developed by combining fast non-local means filter and 2D finite impulse response (FIR) filter with cuckoo search optimization algorithm. In the proposed despeckling filter, the coefficients of 2D FIR filter are optimized by using the cuckoo search optimization algorithm. The quantitative results comparison between the proposed despeckling filter and other existing despeckling filters are analyzed by evaluating PSNR, MSE, MAE, and SSIM values for different real ultrasound images. Results reveal that the visual quality obtained by the proposed despeckling filter is better than other existing despeckling filters. The numerical results also reveal that the proposed despeckling filter is highly effective for despeckling the clinical ultrasound images. © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018.