Speckle suppression in ultrasound images of heterogeneous materials

Sammanfattning: Performing non-destructive testing (NDT) on materials is a helpful tool for maintenance and quality control because the materials are not destroyed or disturbed; ultrasound imaging is one type of NDT. Ultrasound imaging of heterogeneous materials contains many echoes from the material itself. These echoes come from changes in the acoustic impedance, i.e. changes in the relation between the density and the sound speed of the material. However, these echoes will show speckle characteristics in images, making it hard to detect any defects in the imaged material. In this work, a method of suppressing this speckle noise is proposed. The proposed method is a 2D Wiener filter, which with the help of an image of the healthy material models changes in the material when a new image is taken later. The filter models the changes of the speckle noise between images of a defected- and healty material and then supresses the speckle from the image with defects. The filter works well on the artificial images used in this work but have yet to be tested on actual data. A version of a weighted moving average filter was also looked into, but this filter did not produce usable results.