Abstract
We present a novel approach for speckle reduction and coherence enhancement of the ultrasound images. The algorithm maximally low-pass filter those parts of the image which correspond to fully developed speckle, while substantially preserving: information associated with resolved-object structure. The proposed algorithm is based on coherent anisotropic diffusion with an efficient discretization scheme that could be used as a preprocessing step for online visualization of ultrasound images even when it is implemented on a PC based system. It is shown experimentally that this technique produced superior results when compared to results obtained from similar methods.