Despeckle Filtering for Multiscale Amplitude-Modulation Frequency-Modulation (AM-FM) Texture Analysis of Ultrasound Images of the Intima-Media Complex

Table 2

Percentage scoring of visual and objective evaluation of the original and despeckled images by the experts and the natural image quality evaluation (NIQE) index. Bolded values show best performance.

Experts	original	First order statistics		Homogeneous mask area		Non-linear filtering		Diffusion
		DsFlsmv	DsFwiener	DsFkuhawara	DsFlsminsc	DsFmedian	DsFhybridmedian	DsFnldif	DsFsrad
Visual Evaluation
Expert 1	33	26	27	65	51	43	71	59	61
Expert 2	40	30	23	77	65	47	75	65	51
Average %	37	28	25	71	58	45	73	62	56
Objective Evaluation
NIQE	0.861	0.834	0.810	0.981	0.956	0.901	0.987	0.962	0.923
Ranking	7th	8th	9th	2nd	4th	6th	1st	3rd	5th

NIQE: Naturalness image quality evaluation.