A Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound images
Abstract Speckle reduction is still an intractable task in ultrasound imaging field. Ultrasound speckle is usually described as multiplicative noise with its statistics following a Rayleigh or Gaussian distribution. To employ these two distributions effectively, the authors attempt to describe ultra...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Wiley
2021-11-01
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| Series: | IET Image Processing |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1049/ipr2.12332 |
| _version_ | 1828010611071516672 |
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| author | Wenchao Cui Liangzhi Shao Guoqiang Gong Ke Lu Shuifa Sun Yirong Wu Yiyuan Zhou |
| author_facet | Wenchao Cui Liangzhi Shao Guoqiang Gong Ke Lu Shuifa Sun Yirong Wu Yiyuan Zhou |
| author_sort | Wenchao Cui |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Abstract Speckle reduction is still an intractable task in ultrasound imaging field. Ultrasound speckle is usually described as multiplicative noise with its statistics following a Rayleigh or Gaussian distribution. To employ these two distributions effectively, the authors attempt to describe ultrasound speckle using a Weibull distribution, because it can include the Rayleigh distribution as a special case and also approximate a Gaussian distribution by varying its shape and scale parameters. The authors’ contribution in this paper is to propose a Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation (WHTV) method to reduce ultrasound speckle. The WHTV energy functional is convex and consists of a new data fidelity term and a new regularization term. The former is derived from the multiplicative Weibull model of ultrasound speckle based on the maximum likelihood criterion. The latter is a new edge‐weighted combination of the first‐ and second‐order total variation, with the advantage of preserving edges while alleviating the staircase effects. The minimization of the WHTV energy functional is implemented by the split Bregman algorithm. Experimental results on synthetic and real ultrasound images have demonstrated not only that the Weibull distribution is a better fitting model for the statistics of ultrasound speckle than other distributions such as Rayleigh, Gaussian, Gamma, and Nakagami, but also that the proposed WHTV method can achieve better despeckling performance than several state‐of‐the‐art variational methods. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-10T09:01:33Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-d5b19e55535246778835de859e680919 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1751-9659 1751-9667 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-10T09:01:33Z |
| publishDate | 2021-11-01 |
| publisher | Wiley |
| record_format | Article |
| series | IET Image Processing |
| spelling | doaj.art-d5b19e55535246778835de859e6809192023-02-21T11:57:05ZengWileyIET Image Processing1751-96591751-96672021-11-0115133347336710.1049/ipr2.12332A Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound imagesWenchao Cui0Liangzhi Shao1Guoqiang Gong2Ke Lu3Shuifa Sun4Yirong Wu5Yiyuan Zhou6College of Computer and Information Technology China Three Gorges University Yichang ChinaCollege of Computer and Information Technology China Three Gorges University Yichang ChinaCollege of Computer and Information Technology China Three Gorges University Yichang ChinaCollege of Computer and Information Technology China Three Gorges University Yichang ChinaCollege of Computer and Information Technology China Three Gorges University Yichang ChinaCollege of Computer and Information Technology China Three Gorges University Yichang ChinaCollege of Science China Three Gorges University Yichang ChinaAbstract Speckle reduction is still an intractable task in ultrasound imaging field. Ultrasound speckle is usually described as multiplicative noise with its statistics following a Rayleigh or Gaussian distribution. To employ these two distributions effectively, the authors attempt to describe ultrasound speckle using a Weibull distribution, because it can include the Rayleigh distribution as a special case and also approximate a Gaussian distribution by varying its shape and scale parameters. The authors’ contribution in this paper is to propose a Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation (WHTV) method to reduce ultrasound speckle. The WHTV energy functional is convex and consists of a new data fidelity term and a new regularization term. The former is derived from the multiplicative Weibull model of ultrasound speckle based on the maximum likelihood criterion. The latter is a new edge‐weighted combination of the first‐ and second‐order total variation, with the advantage of preserving edges while alleviating the staircase effects. The minimization of the WHTV energy functional is implemented by the split Bregman algorithm. Experimental results on synthetic and real ultrasound images have demonstrated not only that the Weibull distribution is a better fitting model for the statistics of ultrasound speckle than other distributions such as Rayleigh, Gaussian, Gamma, and Nakagami, but also that the proposed WHTV method can achieve better despeckling performance than several state‐of‐the‐art variational methods.https://doi.org/10.1049/ipr2.12332 |
| spellingShingle | Wenchao Cui Liangzhi Shao Guoqiang Gong Ke Lu Shuifa Sun Yirong Wu Yiyuan Zhou A Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound images IET Image Processing |
| title | A Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound images |
| title_full | A Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound images |
| title_fullStr | A Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound images |
| title_full_unstemmed | A Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound images |
| title_short | A Weibull‐distribution‐based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound images |
| title_sort | weibull distribution based hybrid total variation method for speckle reduction in ultrasound images |
| url | https://doi.org/10.1049/ipr2.12332 |
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