Speckle reducing bilateral filter for cattle follicle segmentation.
BACKGROUND
Ultrasound imaging technology has wide applications in cattle reproduction and has been used to monitor individual follicles and determine the patterns of follicular development. However, the speckles in ultrasound images affect the post-processing, such as follicle segmentation and finally affect the measurement of the follicles. In order to reduce the effect of speckles, a bilateral filter is developed in this paper.


RESULTS
We develop a new bilateral filter for speckle reduction in ultrasound images for follicle segmentation and measurement. Different from the previous bilateral filters, the proposed bilateral filter uses normalized difference in the computation of the Gaussian intensity difference. We also present the results of follicle segmentation after speckle reduction. Experimental results on both synthetic images and real ultrasound images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter.


CONCLUSIONS
Compared with the previous bilateral filters, the proposed bilateral filter can reduce speckles in both high-intensity regions and low intensity regions in ultrasound images. The segmentation of the follicles in the speckle reduced images by the proposed method has higher performance than the segmentation in the original ultrasound image, and the images filtered by Gaussian filter, the conventional bilateral filter respectively.
Image Processing and Bioimaging Research Laboratory, System Research Institute & Department of Advanced Technologies, Alcorn State University, Alcorn State, MS, USA. jtang@alcorn.edu
Jinshan
J
Tang
Shengwen
S
Guo
Qingling
Q
Sun
Youping
Y
Deng
Dongfeng
D
Zhou
D000818:Animals; D002417:Cattle; D005260:Female; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D006080:Ovarian Follicle / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D014463:Ultrasonography / Q000379:methods