Adaptive wavelet packet-based de-speckling of ultrasound images with bilateral filter.

A new adaptive wavelet packet-based approach to minimize speckle noise in ultrasound images is proposed. This method combines wavelet packet thresholding with a bilateral filter. Here, the best bases after wavelet packet decomposition are selected by comparing the first singular value of all sub-bands, and the noisy coefficients are thresholded using a modified NeighShrink technique. The algorithm is tested with various ultrasound images, and the results, in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio and mean structural similarity values, are compared with those for some well-known de-speckling techniques. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method has better potential to minimize speckle noise and retain fine details of the ultrasound image.