Search

Images are widely used in engineering. But, some images such as medical ultrasound images are mainly degraded by an intrinsic noise called speckle. Therefore, de-speckling is a main pre-processing stage for degraded images. In this paper, we suggest three phases and three denoising filters. In the first phase, the coefficient of variation is computed from the noisy image. Next, fuzzy c-means (FCM) is applied to the coefficients of variation. Applying FCM leads to the fuzzy classification of image regions. Next, the second phase is a hybrid of the three denoising filters. Fast bilateral filter (BF) for homogeneous regions, improved the adaptive wiener filters (AWFs) and wavelet filter that are applied on homogeneous, detail and edge regions, respectively. The proposed improved AWF has been developed from the AWF. In the third phase, the output image is evaluated by the fuzzy logic approach. Thus, with three phases, the proposed method has a better image detail preservation compared to some other standard methods. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed denoising algorithm is able to preserve image details and edges compared with other de-speckling methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]