Ultrasound image despeckling using polar coordinate system and Monte Carlo approach.

In view of the characteristics of ultrasound image acquisition and speckle noise statistics, this paper proposes an despeckling algorithm based on polar coordinate system and Monte Carlo estimation scheme. Firstly, it took logarithmic transformation to noisy images in polar coordinate system. Then, it acquired a set of samples in any radial direction with the estimated point in global spatial domain, and constructed weighting factor according to speckle noise model and the spatial correlation between sample point and estimated point. Consequently, the algorithmused the Monte Carlo method to achieve speckle noise likelihood-weighted estimate. Experimental results demonstrate that, the presented algorithm can better remove speckle noise while preserving image structures and details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]