Speckle noise reduction in echocardiography using a bank of filters based on oriented structuring elements

Speckle noise filtering has been investigated since at least fifty years, this multiplicative and granular interference may be found in any image, i.e, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), optical coherence tomography, and of course, medical ultrasound imaging. Speckle noise is produced by structural characteristics of materials, in case of the ultrasound imaging case, by small structural irregularities. This work proposes a novel speckle noise filtering strategy using a bank of morphological multi-scale filters that captures anisotropic information and additionally preserves cardiac structures. This method is compared against commonly used filters, namely: Anisotropic Diffusion Filter (ADMSS), Non-Local Means Filter (NLMF) and Detail Preserving Anisotropic Diffusion Filter (DPAD).