Noise Reduction, Enhancement and Classification for Sonar Images

Abstract

    Ultrasound imaging has some problems with image properties output. These affects the specialist decision. Ultrasound noise type is the speckle noise which has a grainy pattern depending on the signal. There are two parts of this study. The first part is the enhancing of images with adaptive Weiner, Lee, Gamma and Frost filters with 3x3, 5x5, and 7x7 sliding windows. The evaluated process was achieved using signal to noise ratio (SNR), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), and maximum difference (MD) criteria. The second part consists of simulating noise in a standard image (Lina image) by adding different percentage of speckle noise from 0.01 to 0.06. The supervised classification based minimum distance method is used to evaluate the results depending on selecting four blocks located at different places on the image. Speckle noise was added with different percentage from 0.01 to 0.06 to calculate the coherent noise within the image. The coherent noise was concluded from the slope of the standard deviation with the mean for each noise. The results showed that the additive noise increased with the slide window size, while multiplicative noise did not change with the sliding window nor with increasing noise ratio. Wiener filter has the best results in enhancing the noise.