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Ultrasound spatiotemporal despeckling via Kronecker wavelet-Fisz thresholding

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Abstract

We propose a novel framework for despeckling ultrasound image sequences while respecting the structural details. More precisely, we use thresholding in an adapted wavelet domain that jointly takes into account for the non-Gaussian statistics of the noise and the differences in spatial and temporal regularities. The spatiotemporal wavelet is obtained via the Kronecker product of two sparsifying wavelet bases acting, respectively, on the spatial and temporal domains. Besides enabling a structured sparse representation of the time–space plan, it also makes it possible to perform a variance stabilization routine on the spatial domain through a Fisz transformation. The proposed method enjoys adaptability, easy tuning and theoretical guaranties. We propose the corresponding algorithm together with results that demonstrate the benefits of the proposed spatiotemporal approach over the successive spatial treatment. Finally, we describe a data-driven extension of the proposed method that is based on temporal pre-filtering.

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Notes

  1. Available on https://sites.google.com/site/pierrickcoupe/softwares/denoising-for-medical-imaging/speckle-reduction/obnlm-package.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by “Région Rhône-Alpes” under the ARC 6. L. Navarro’s research was supported by the (ANR) under reference ANR-15-CE19-0002 (LBSMI). P. Delachartre was within the framework of the Labex CELYA (ANR-10-LABX-0060) and Labex PRIMES (ANR-11-LABX-0063) of the Université de Lyon.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Medical Image Processing Lab, Institute of Bioengineering, EPFL, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Younes Farouj

  2. CNRS UMR 5307; LGF, École Nationale Supérieure des Mines, 42023, Saint-Étienne, France

    Laurent Navarro

  3. Institute of Statistics, Université de Neuchâtel, Av. de Bellevaux 51, 2000, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Jean-Marc Freyermuth

  4. Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, CNRS UMR 5224, Université de Grenoble, Grenoble, France

    Marianne Clausel

  5. CREATIS; CNRS UMR5220; Inserm U1044; INSA-Lyon, Université de Lyon, Lyon, 69622, France

    Philippe Delachartre

Authors
  1. Younes Farouj
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  2. Laurent Navarro
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  3. Jean-Marc Freyermuth
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  4. Marianne Clausel
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  5. Philippe Delachartre
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Younes Farouj.

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Farouj, Y., Navarro, L., Freyermuth, JM. et al. Ultrasound spatiotemporal despeckling via Kronecker wavelet-Fisz thresholding. SIViP 12, 1125–1132 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-018-1260-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-018-1260-6

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