Real time ultrasound image denoising

Fernanda Palhano Xavier de Fontes (1) , Guillermo Andrade Barroso (2) , Pierrick Coupé (3) , Pierre Hellier (4)

1 VisAGeS - Vision, Action et Gestion d'informations en Santé
2 SED [Rennes] - Service Expérimentation et Développement
3 Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital
4 SERPICO - Space-timE RePresentation, Imaging and cellular dynamics of molecular COmplexes

Image denoising is the process of removing the noise that perturbs image analysis methods. In some applications like segmentation or registration, denoising is intended to smooth homogeneous areas while preserving the contours. In many applications like video analysis, visual servoing or image-guided surgical interventions, real-time denoising is required. This paper presents a method for real-time denoising of ultrasound images: a modified version of the NL-means method is presented that incorporates an ultrasound dedicated noise model, as well as a GPU implementation of the algorithm. Results demonstrate that the proposed method is very efficient in terms of denoising quality and is real-time.

Domaines: Recherche d'information [cs.IR]

Fernanda Palhano Xavier de Fontes, Guillermo Andrade Barroso, Pierrick Coupé, Pierre Hellier. Real time ultrasound image denoising. Journal of Real-Time Image Processing, 2010, ⟨10.1007/s11554-010-0158-5⟩. ⟨inria-00476122v2⟩