A New Ultrasound Image Denoising Method Combining Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform and Edge-Preserving Self-Snake Model

In order to suppressing the speckle noise in ultrasound image effectively, a new hybrid denoising method is proposed by combining the nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) with edge-preserving self-snake model (EPSSM). The method comprises of three key steps. Firstly, the noise model is established for the sake of analyzing. Then the map estimation with bivariate shrinkage function which uses the inter-scale dependency is developed to deal with the NSCT coefficients. Finally, the EPSSM is introduced to enhance the edge and reduce the blurring which is caused by the second steps. The comparative experiments show that the proposed approach gets better results than other well-known methods in the area of the evaluation values and visual effect.