International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, October-2010 1

HYBRID SPECKLING TECHNIQUES IN UL-

TRASOUND IMAGES
Alamelumangai.N, Dr. DeviShree.J

Abstract— Speckle noise is an inherent property of medical ultrasound imaging, and it generally tends to reduce the image
resolution and contrast, thereby reducing the diagnostic value of this imaging modality. The adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference
system (ANFIS) is an effective tool that can be applied to induce rules from observations. In this paper, the ultrasound image
restoration contaminated with speckle noise is investigated in nonlinear passage dynamics of order 2. This paper uses the pi-
shaped MF and other parameters include the training epochs, the number of MFs for each input, the optimization method, the
type of output MFs, and the over-fitting problem, are investigated. For comparison with the proposed technique, this paper
simulates the adaptive mean, weighted mean and median filters, etc. It is observed that the quality in terms of mean square
error (MSE) of the proposed method is multiple times better for speckle noise than that derived using any other conventional
filtering techniques.

Keywords— Speckle Noise reduction, Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, Digital Image Processing, Ultrasound images.

1 INTRODUCTION

U ltrasound images are corrupted by noise due to a

noisy channel or faulty image acquisition device.
Speckle noise is a phenomenon that accompanies all
method explores the use of adaptive network-based fuzzy
inference systems for use in noise cancellation.

coherent imaging modalities in which images are pro-

duced by interfering echoes of a transmitted waveform
that emanate from heterogeneities of the studied objects.
The superposition of acoustical echoes coming with ran-
dom phases and amplitudes tends to produce an intricate
interference pattern, known as speckle noise that scales
from zero to a maximum 255, depending on whether the
interference is destructive or constructive. Much re-
search has been done on removing noise.
The aim of this paper is to suppress the noise while pre-
serving the integrity of the edges and details of images.
For example, mean filtering [6] is a linear technique to
remove random Gaussian noise. However, while it re-
moves the noise, it also removes too much detail and
edge sharpness in image processing. Median filtering [6]
is a nonlinear technique that is known for its effectiveness
in removing noise, especially impulse noise, while pre-
serving edge sharpness in image processing [1, 15, 17].
However the coherent nature of ultrasound images re-
sults in images with speckle noise that reduces it’s utility
in diagnosis and complicates image processing tasks.
The proposed noise reduction with adaptive neuro-fuzzy
inference system (ANFIS) is inspired by Widrow and
Glover’s [20] adaptive noise cancellation model for 1-D
signals, in which the objective is to filter out noise by
identifying a nonlinear model between a measurable
noise source and the corresponding immeasurable inter-
ference while removing noise in 1-D signals with Jang’s
ANFIS. In ANFIS, neural networks exploit their struc-
tures with abundant theorems and efficient numerical
training algorithms while fuzzy systems can directly en-
code structured knowledge. The combination between
fuzzy systems and neural networks generates an adaptive
system in that the neural networks embed in an overall
fuzzy architecture, generating and
refining fuzzy rules from training data. The proposed
2. RELATED WORK
With the applications and development of soft compu-
ting, more and more methods of fuzzy and neural net-
works have been developed to solve the problems at the
practical level. Recently, adaptive systems based on neur-
al networks [7, 11] or fuzzy theory [2, 14, 18] with data-
driven adjustable parameters have emerged as attractive
alternatives.
For noise reduction in images, Kwan [12] presented seven
fuzzy filters. They are the Gaussian fuzzy filter with me-
dian center, the symmetrical triangular fuzzy filter with
median center, the asymmetrical triangular fuzzy filter
with median center, the Gaussian fuzzy filter with mov-
ing average center, the symmetrical triangular fuzzy filter
with moving average center, the asymmetrical triangular
fuzzy filter with moving average center, and the decreas-
ing weight fuzzy filter with moving average center. Every
fuzzy filter uses a weighted membership function (MF)
on an image in a sub-image window to determine the
center pixel. It is difficult to control the size of window
width because a small window width is appropriate for a
low level of noise and a large one is appropriate for a
high level of noise.
Kalaykov and Tolt [10] proposed a filter for reducing
mixed noise in images. The filter evaluates fuzzy similari-
ties between pixels in a local sub-image processing win-
dow.
Fotopoulos et al. [5] described the design and evaluation
of three fuzzy color filters: multichannel fuzzy filter
(MFF), multichannel filter based on local histogram val-
ues (HMF), and fuzzy color filter using relative entropy
(RELF), based on a specific local image model. The fuzzy
variables are extracted from the estimation of the local
distribution. The results of RELF are degraded a little by
the presence of impulse noise, and MFF is less efficient

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