Adaptive Fractal Filtering of Echocardiograms
Milorad P. Paskaš, Member, IEEE, Ana M. Gavrovska, Member, IEEE, Dragi M. Dujkoviü and
Branimir D. Reljin, Senior Member, IEEE
 Some filters from the literature (Lee’s, Kuan’s, or Frost’s
Abstract— Echocardiograms are inherently corrupted by the
speckle noise. Elimination of the noise is usually treated with low-
pass filters which can degrade edges in the image. Adaptive
approaches employ masks for edges and restrict low-pass
filtering mainly to homogeneous regions. Masks are based on
statistical parameters or gradients. In this paper are applied local
dimension matrices from fractal model as masks. Experimental
tests are conducted for two simple low-pass filters (i) average
filter and Gaussian filter (ii) and using three multifractal
measures known from the literature – MIN, MAX and OSC
measure. Obtained results for adaptive approaches show
improvements over non-adaptive approaches in all analyzed
scenarios.
Index Terms—Echocardiogram, fractal dimension, image
denoising, speckle noise, ultrasound.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE cardiac ultrasound or echocardiography is a low-cost
medical diagnostic technique. Besides its accessibility
there is a multiplicative noise present in echocardiograms. It is
visible as a textural (granular) structure in the image and its
presence deteriorates image quality. Speckle noise cannot be
eliminated in the acquisition process, since it is generated from
the structures in the tissue, but only in the post-processing step
[1].
There are many filters designed for echocardiograms
despeckling. Almost all of them are based on the use of some
of averaging techniques (averaging, Gaussian filter, median
filter, Wiener filter, etc.). Averaging-based filters strongly
remove speckle noise but, as a consequence of the same
treatment of all the pixels in the echocardiogram, the edges
and textures in the image are blurred. Edges indicate
boundaries of the heart chambers and heart valves in the
echocardiogram and loss of edges quality can lead to
misdiagnosis.
M. P. Paskaš, is with the Innovation Center of School of Electrical
Engineering, University of Belgrade, Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 73, Belgrade,
Serbia (e-mail: milorad.paskas@ieee.org, milorad.paskas@gmail.com).
A. M. Gavrovska, is with the School of Electrical Engineering, University
of Belgrade, Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 73, Belgrade, Serbia (e-mail:
anaga777@gmail.com).
D. M. Dujkoviü, is with the School of Electrical Engineering, University of
filter), which are based on image statistics, are employed for
adaptive image despeckling. They observe local mean value
and standard deviation in the image. Low-pass image filtering
is conducted with respect to statistical parameters: the pixels
with low standard deviation are strongly filtered while pixels
with high standard deviation (most probably edge pixels) are
less affected by low-pass filter.
Filters based on diffusion controlled with image gradient
(e.g. Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion filter [2]) locate
edges with gradient masks instead of standard deviation.
Gradient operators are used as edge detectors and high values
of gradient indicate edges.
Filtering techniques used in this paper represent adapted
fractal techniques proposed in [3] and [4], where they were
used for filtering of natural images. Edges are detected within
these techniques using local fractal dimensions instead of
gradients. Fractal dimensions are more powerful in the textural
regions than gradient operators since the fractal dimensions
are calculated for scalable neighborhoods. Local dimensions
are calculated for three multifractal measures (MIN, MAX,
and OSC) from the literature and two low-pass filters
(averaging and Gaussian filter).
The paper is organized as follows. In the second section
mathematical background of the fractal model is given. Third
section provides a method of echocardiograms denoising.
Results obtained using fractal model for noise elimination are
given in section 4. The last section discusses results of
denoising method and suggests directions for future research.
II. LOCAL DIMENSIONS
Fractal model examines dimensionality of a signal in a
sense of geometry. Dimensionality is in close relation to
“size” of a signal or, more precisely, to its measure (length,
area, or volume). Since the dimension is generalized and can
be non-integer, the measure is generalized likewise. In order to
calculate a measure, the signal is subdivided into small
partitions of arbitrary shape, Ak , and all of them are summed.
The most general definition of a measure is given by
Hausdorff [5].
s ­ ½
 A  { Hlim inf ®¦ diam s  Ak  : diam  Ak  d H  1¾ .
(1)
o0
¯k ¿
Belgrade, Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 73, Belgrade, Serbia (e-mail:
dragi@etf.rs). This is analogue to traditional definition of a measure and
B. D. Reljin, is with the School of Electrical Engineering, University of dimension, DH , is the value of s for which measure reaches
Belgrade, Bulevar kralja Aleksandra 73, Belgrade, Serbia (e-mail:
reljinb@etf.rs). finite values:

978-1-4799-5888-7/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE

 III. DENOSING METHODOLOGY
Local multifractal measures defined in (5), (6), and (7)
­f, 0 d s  DH produce local dimension matrices similar to gradient images.
s ° (2) These measures are, further, used as edge detectors [8]. This is
 A ® const , s DH
° 0, s ! D now used for adaptive denoising of echocardiograms:
¯ H
predominantly homogeneous regions are supposed to be
stronger filtered while edges are preserved.
Partitions of a signal, used in (1), are infinitely small and of
One of the solutions is given in the form [9], [10]:
arbitrary shape and size, therefore this definition is not
applicable in practice. Instead of Hausdorff measure there is
usually used box-counting method, where all the partitions are
of the same size and shape.
Hausdorff definition of a measure from (1) implies that all
the points of the signal have the same dimension. This is not
true in general when the signal is modeled as a
multidimensional of multifractal. Instead of calculating
universal (global) dimension of a whole signal it is more
appropriate to calculate dimension of each point individually.
The local measure, P , is correspondingly calculated for each
y 1  D  ˜ xLP  D ˜ x (8)
where x is the input image, xLP is the low-pass filtered input
image, y is the output of adaptive filter. Parameter D takes
values from the range > 0,1@ . It means that small values of this
parameter (close to 0) favors low-pass filter, while larger
values of this parameter (close to 1) remain pixel intensity
almost unchanged. Block diagram of adaptive filter from (8) is
illustrated in Fig. 1. Large values of the local dimension, for
point in its infinitely small neighborhood,   x, r  :
all three observed multifractal measures, correspond to edges
and textures and that guarantees edge preservation in the
dP
P    x, r    r (3) echocardiogram.

Dimension of a single point, d P , is called local dimension LFD

or Hölder exponent. This parameter exhibits local trend of
behavior of each point. Local measure is calculated using
Hausdorff definition or any other. If a pixel intensity is
interpreted as a local measure, when r ri 0 , then local Input Output
LPF
measure satisfies [6]: Image Image

1s
­ ½ Fig. 1. Block diagram of implemented adaptive filter. Local fractal dimensions
P    x, y, r   d ®¦ P s    xi , yi , ri   ¾
¯ i
In other words, local measure is less or equal to generalized
mean of local measures of single pixels. Inequality from (4)
reduces to MAX measure [7] when s o f :
(4) (LFD) control the low-pass filter (LPF).
¿
IV. RESULTS
For testing purposes two low-pass filters are implemented:
average filter and Gaussian filter. Local dimension matrices
are obtained using three multifractal measures: MAX, MIN,
and OSC. The sizes of scales, employed in calculation of local
P MAX    x, y, r  
i
^
max P    xi , yi , ri   . ` (5)
For s o f one obtains MIN measure [7]:
dimensions, are determined experimentally. The scales should
be small enough to follow the local trend of the measure.
Scales used in all subsequent experiments are: 5, 7, 9, and 11.
Echocardiograms are taken from 6 videos from [11]. The
extracted frames are cropped and obtained images are of
P 1MIN    x, y, r   ^ `
min P    xi , yi , ri   .
i
(6)
various sizes.
Quality measure used for evaluation of obtained results is
Measure OSC [4] is defined in a similar way: effective average gradient (EAG) [12] and it is calculated as:

POSC    x, y, r   ¦ P    xi , yi , r    P    xi , yi , r   . (7) TG
EAG (9)
i TP

Using (3) it is possible now to determine local dimension of where TG represents the total sum of gradients within the
a point. When local dimensions are calculated for all the image and TP represents the number of pixels with non-zero
points, the corresponding matrix is denoted as a local gradients. EAG does not depend on image size and it gives
dimension matrix. information on edges preserved.
 a) a) b)

b) c) c) d)
Fig. 3. a) Image obtained by Gaussian filter applied on image from Fig. 2.a),
and adaptive filtering using Gaussian filter and multifractal measures: b)
MAX, c) MIN, d) OSC. Window size of all filters is 7x7 pixels.

5
d) e)
Fig. 2. a) Original image, b) image obtained by average filter, and adaptive
EAG

filtering using average filter and multifractal measures: c)MAX, d) MIN, e) 4

OSC. Window size of all filters is 7x7 pixels.
3 Averaging
Illustration of proposed adaptive filtering techniques is shown
Adaptive MIN
in Fig. 2, when averaging is applied. In comparison when only Adaptive MAX
averaging is applied it is visually clear the preservation of 2
Adaptive OSC
edges, where the MIN and MAX local dimensions provide
better preservation of edges. 1
1 2 3 4 5 6
Fig. 3 shows adaptive denoising when Gaussian filter is Image number
applied. The differences between all four filtered images
(Gaussian filter and three adaptive methods) are not distinct as Fig. 4. EAG values for average filter and adaptive filtering using average filter
with averaging filter. and multifractal measures (MAX, MIN, OSC). Window size of all filters is
7x7 pixels.
Measure EAG is calculated for all three multifractal
measures and for two scales, when averaging is applied. From
V. CONCLUSION
Figure 3 it is evident the improvement of all three proposed
methods over averaging. The improvement is the smallest for This paper implements three multifractal measures from
echocardiograms 3 and 5. literature for adaptive denoising of echocardiograms. Local
EAG values are calculated also for Gaussian filtering and fractal dimensions are used as a parameter that controls low-
corresponding adaptive methods. The results are shown in Fig. pass filtering. Experimental results indicate preservation of
5. As it is already confirmed by visual inspection of images edges in the echocardiograms when adaptive filtering
from Fig. 3, EAG values in this case varies negligibly. techniques are applied. This is particularly evident with larger
Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 give EAG values when filtering window filtering windows.
is of size 15x15 pixels. It is clear from these figures that EAG The future research of denoising echocardiograms will be
values for all filtering methods decrease. It is the most directed towards implementation of other multifractal
dramatically exhibited for non-adaptive filters. The difference measures from the literature.
between adaptive and non-adaptive methods is more distinct.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT
8
This work was supported in part by the Ministry of
Education, Science and Technological Development, Republic
7 of Serbia, through the Grant number III44009.

6
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EAG

5
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Fig. 6. EAG values for average filter and adaptive filtering using average filter
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4
EAG

3
Averaging
Adaptive MIN
2
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Adaptive OSC

1
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Fig. 7. EAG values for Gaussian filter and adaptive filtering using Gaussian
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