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specklefilt

Filter image using speckle-reducing anisotropic diffusion

Since R2022b

Description

Coherent imaging modalities, such as ultrasound images, are prone to degradation because of the interference of the transmitted waveform and its echoes. This degradation is called speckle, and is a form of multiplicative noise. The specklefilt function uses a speckle-reducing anisotropic diffusion (SRAD) algorithm to reduce the speckle in an image.

example

J = specklefilt(I) filters the image I using SRAD and returns the filtered image J.

example

J = specklefilt(I,Name=Value) fine-tunes the behavior of the SRAD algorithm using one or more optional name-value arguments.

Examples

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Import an ultrasound image into the workspace.

I = imread("heartUltrasoundImage.png"); 

Filter the image using the speckle-reducing anisotropic diffusion algorithm with default parameters.

J1 = specklefilt(I);

You can increase the smoothing the filter performs on the image by increasing the degree of smoothing of the algorithm. Specify a degree of smoothing of 0.6, increased from the default value of 0.2.

J2 = specklefilt(I,DegreeOfSmoothing=0.6);

You can also increase the smoothing by increasing the number of iterations performed by the algorithm. Specify for the algorithm to perform 50 iterations, increased from the default value of 30.

J3 = specklefilt(I,NumIterations=50);

Filter the image using the SRAD algorithm with both an increased degree of smoothing and greater number of iterations. Set the degree of smoothing to 0.6 and the number of iterations to 50.

J4 = specklefilt(I,DegreeOfSmoothing=0.6,NumIterations=50);

Display the original image alongside the denoised images, and inspect the different smoothing levels.

figure
montage({I J1 J2 J3 J4})

Import an ultrasound image into the workspace.

I = imread("heartUltrasoundImage.png"); 

Corrupt the image with multiplicative speckle drawn from a uniform distribution.

Inoise = imnoise(I,"speckle");

Filter the corrupted image to remove speckle. Display the corrupted and denoised images.

J = specklefilt(Inoise,DegreeOfSmoothing=0.6,NumIterations=50);
figure
montage({Inoise J})

Compute the structural similarity of the denoised image J with the original image I.

disp(ssim(I,J))
    0.9429

Corrupt the image with multiplicative speckle drawn from a Rayleigh distribution.

I = im2double(I);
Inoise = I.*raylrnd(1,size(I));

Filter the corrupted image to remove speckle. Display the corrupted and denoised images.

J = specklefilt(Inoise,DegreeOfSmoothing=0.6,NumIterations=50);
figure
montage({Inoise J})

Compute the structural similarity between the denoised image J and the original image I.

disp(ssim(I,J))
    0.7781

Import an ultrasound image sequence into the workspace.

I = dicomread("heartUltrasoundSequence.dcm");
[h,w,c,d] = size(I);

View the original image sequence.

figure
montage(I)
title("Original Image Sequence")

Convert each image in the sequence to grayscale. Filter the grayscale images.

J = zeros(h,w,d);
for i = 1:d
    Ii = im2double(im2gray(I(:,:,:,i)));
    J(:,:,i) = specklefilt(Ii,DegreeOfSmoothing=0.6,NumIterations=50);
end

View the denoised image sequence.

figure
montage(J)
title("Denoised Image Sequence")

Input Arguments

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Image to be filtered, specified as a 2-D numeric matrix.

Data Types: single | double | int8 | int16 | int32 | int64 | uint8 | uint16 | uint32 | uint64

Name-Value Arguments

Specify optional pairs of arguments as Name1=Value1,...,NameN=ValueN, where Name is the argument name and Value is the corresponding value. Name-value arguments must appear after other arguments, but the order of the pairs does not matter.

Example: J = specklefilt(I,DegreeOfSmoothing=0.6,NumIterations=50) applies the SRAD filter to image I with a degree of smoothing of 0.6 for 50 iterations, and returns the filtered image J.

Degree of smoothing of the SRAD filter, specified as a scalar in the range (0, 1]. Increasing the value of DegreeOfSmoothing denoises the image to a greater degree.

Data Types: single | double | int8 | int16 | int32 | int64 | uint8 | uint16 | uint32 | uint64

Number of iterations of the SRAD filter, specified as a positive integer. Increasing the value of NumIterations denoises the image to a greater degree.

Data Types: single | double | int8 | int16 | int32 | int64 | uint8 | uint16 | uint32 | uint64

Output Arguments

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SRAD-filtered image, returned as a 2-D numeric matrix of the same size and data type as the input image I.

Algorithms

The speckle-reducing anisotropic diffusion used in specklefilt combines elements of speckle-reducing filters with the edge-preserving anisotropic diffusion filter used in imdiffusefilt. This makes specklefilt useful for edge-preserving denoising of images corrupted with speckle.

References

[1] Yongjian Yu, and S.T. Acton. “Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion.” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 11, no. 11 (November 2002): 1260–70. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIP.2002.804276.

[2] Aja-Fernandez, S., and C. Alberola-Lopez. “On the Estimation of the Coefficient of Variation for Anisotropic Diffusion Speckle Filtering.” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 15, no. 9 (September 2006): 2694–2701. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIP.2006.877360.

Version History

Introduced in R2022b