Bayesian non local means-based speckle filtering

In ultrasound (US) imaging, denoising is intended to improve quantitative image analysis techniques. In this paper, a new version of the non local (nl) means filter adapted for US images is proposed. Originally developed for Gaussian noise removal, a Bayesian framework is used to adapt the NL means filter for speckle noise. Experiments were carried out on synthetic data sets with different speckle simulations. Results show that our NL means-based speckle filter outperforms the classical implementation of the NL means filter, as well as two other speckle adapted denoising methods (SRAD and SBF filters).