Morphological operations for ultrasound images by locally variable structuring elements and their analysis of effective parameters

In an ultrasound image, shape is one of the most important forms of diagnostic information for qualitative and quantitative differentiation of tissues. A new adaptive morphological operation using variable structuring elements is discussed and their characteristics are shown. Relating parameters are studied to develop an appropriate image segmentation program. The level of the structuring element changes depending on the local region of the processing image and yields an adaptive morphological operation. For example, one can smooth the image and enhance edges at a time by this method, but conventional invariant structuring element can not do both. The authors demonstrate that the proposed method removes speckle noises and enhances the blurred boundary of an ultrasound image.