Real time ultrasound image denoising

Image denoising is the process of removing the noise that perturbs image analysis methods. In some applications like segmentation or registration, denoising is intended to smooth homogeneous areas while preserving the contours. In many applications like video analysis, visual servoing or image-guided surgical interventions, real-time denoising is required. This paper presents a method for real-time denoising of ultrasound images: a modified version of the NL-means method is presented that incorporates an ultrasound dedicated noise model, as well as a GPU implementation of the algorithm. Results demonstrate that the proposed method is very efficient in terms of denoising quality and is real-time.