Novel approach to noise reduction in ultrasound images based on geodesic paths

In this paper a new method of multiplicative noise reduction in ultrasound images is proposed. The novel technique is a modification of the bilateral denosing scheme, which takes into account the similarity of pixels and their spatial distance. The filter output is calculated as a weighted average of the pixels which are in the neighborhood relation with the center of the filtering window, and the weights are functions of the minimal connection costs between surounding pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields significantly better results than the other techniques in case of ultrasound images contaminated by medium and strong multiplicative noise disturbances.