Robust non-local means filter for ultrasound image denoising

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust non-local means filter tailored for ultrasound image denoising, which selectively down-weights highly corrupted pixels to improve edge and detail preservation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel weighting scheme that identifies and reduces the influence of heavily corrupted pixels in non-local means denoising for ultrasound images.

Findings

Effective edge and detail preservation demonstrated

Superior performance over traditional methods in evaluations

Improved noise reduction in ultrasound images

Abstract

This paper introduces a new approach to non-local means image denoising. Instead of using all pixels located in the search window for estimating the value of a pixel, we identify the highly corrupted pixels and assign less weight to these pixels. This method is called robust non-local means. Numerical and subjective evaluations using ultrasound images show good performances of the proposed denoising method in recovering the shape of edges and important detailed components, in comparison to traditional ultrasound image denoising methods