Active Contour Model for Ultrasound Images with Rayleigh Distribution

Ultrasound images are often corrupted by multiplicative noises with Rayleigh distribution. The noises are strong and often called speckle noise, so segmentation is a hard work with this kind of noises. In this paper, we incorporate multiplicative noise removing model into active contour model for ultrasound images segmentation. To model gray level behavior of ultrasound images, the classic Rayleigh probability distribution is considered. Our model can segment the noisy ultrasound images very well. Finally, a fast method called Split-Bregman method is used for the easy implementation of segmentation. Experiments on a variety of synthetic and real ultrasound images validate the performance of our method.