Noise Reduction in Intravascular Ultrasound Images Using Curvelet Transform and Adaptive Complex Diffusion Filter: a Comparative Study

Speckle noise reduction is the first and important step for intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) image analysis. A comparison between the performances of the curvelet transformand adaptive complex diffusion filter method for ultrasound despeckling is presented in this paper. In this study, theadaptive complex diffusion filter which is widely used for despeckling, is applied to real intravascular ultrasound images and results were quantitatively and visually compared to that ofcurvelet based despeckling. The results show that curvelet based method outperforms the adaptive complex diffusion filterand can effectively reduce most of the speckle noise content of an intravascular ultrasound image.

Keywords:

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images , Speckle noise reduction , Curvelet , Diffusion filter