Motion Estimation Using the Firefly Algorithm in Ultrasonic Image Sequence of Soft Tissue.

Chao, Chih-Feng; Horng, Ming-Huwi; Chen, Yu-Chan

Ultrasonic image sequence of the soft tissue is widely used in disease diagnosis; however, the speckle noises usually influenced the image quality. These images usually have a low signal-to-noise ratio presentation. The phenomenon gives rise to traditional motion estimation algorithms that are not suitable to measure the motion vectors. In this paper, a new motion estimation algorithm is developed for assessing the velocity field of soft tissue in a sequence of ultrasonic B-mode images. The proposed iterative firefly algorithm (IFA) searches for few candidate points to obtain the optimal motion vector, and then compares it to the traditional iterative full search algorithm (IFSA) via a series of experiments of in vivo ultrasonic image sequences. The experimental results show that the IFA can assess the vector with better efficiency and almost equal estimation quality compared to the traditional IFSA method.

MOTION estimation (Signal processing); ALGORITHMS; ULTRASONIC imaging; DIAGNOSTIC examinations; SIGNAL-to-noise ratio; IMAGE quality in diagnostic ultrasonic imaging

Computational & Mathematical Methods in Medicine, 2015, Vol 2015, p1

1748-670X

Academic Journal

10.1155/2015/343217