Ultrasound Water Leakage Image Denoising By The Iterative Mmse Filter Abstract

Ultrasound imaging finds many applications in water environments. The water leakage milieu is considered in this study. However, the ultrasound images are contaminated by speckle noise which damages its quality. It complicates diagnosis and quantitative and visual measurements. In this work, the iterative minimum mean square error (IMMSE) method has been extended for de-speckling of ultrasound images. Therefore, by optimally setting the number of iterations, the IMMSE filtering approach outperforms traditional speckle filtering methods such as the mean, median and the improved Lee filters in speckle removal and edge preservation.

1. Introduction

Ultrasounds waves have frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of human hearing (i. e. 20kHz). Their use covers a wide range of applications such as monitoring of groundwater and soil moisture, medical imaging analysis, etc.