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Summary: 1260 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 11, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2002
Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion
Yongjian Yu and Scott T. Acton, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract--This paper provides the derivation of speckle
reducing anisotropic diffusion (SRAD), a diffusion method tai-
lored to ultrasonic and radar imaging applications. SRAD is the
edge-sensitive diffusion for speckled images, in the same way that
conventional anisotropic diffusion is the edge-sensitive diffusion
for images corrupted with additive noise. We first show that the
Lee and Frost filters can be cast as partial differential equations,
and then we derive SRAD by allowing edge-sensitive anisotropic
diffusion within this context. Just as the Lee and Frost filters
utilize the coefficient of variation in adaptive filtering, SRAD
exploits the instantaneous coefficient of variation, which is shown
to be a function of the local gradient magnitude and Laplacian
operators. We validate the new algorithm using both synthetic and
real linear scan ultrasonic imagery of the carotid artery. We also
demonstrate the algorithm performance with real SAR data. The
performance measures obtained by means of computer simulation
of carotid artery images are compared with three existing speckle
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