EdgeSRIE: A hybrid deep learning framework for real-time speckle reduction and image enhancement on portable ultrasound systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cho, Hyunwoo, Lee, Jongsoo, Kang, Jinbum, Yoo, Yangmo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cho, Hyunwoo
Lee, Jongsoo
Kang, Jinbum
Yoo, Yangmo
author_facet Cho, Hyunwoo
Lee, Jongsoo
Kang, Jinbum
Yoo, Yangmo
contents Speckle patterns in ultrasound images often obscure anatomical details, leading to diagnostic uncertainty. Recently, various deep learning (DL)-based techniques have been introduced to effectively suppress speckle; however, their high computational costs pose challenges for low-resource devices, such as portable ultrasound systems. To address this issue, EdgeSRIE, which is a lightweight hybrid DL framework for real-time speckle reduction and image enhancement in portable ultrasound imaging, is introduced. The proposed framework consists of two main branches: an unsupervised despeckling branch, which is trained by minimizing a loss function between speckled images, and a deblurring branch, which restores blurred images to sharp images. For hardware implementation, the trained network is quantized to 8-bit integer precision and deployed on a low-resource system-on-chip (SoC) with limited power consumption. In the performance evaluation with phantom and in vivo analyses, EdgeSRIE achieved the highest contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and average gradient magnitude (AGM) compared with the other baselines (different 2-rule-based methods and other 4-DL-based methods). Furthermore, EdgeSRIE enabled real-time inference at over 60 frames per second while satisfying computational requirements (< 20K parameters) on actual portable ultrasound hardware. These results demonstrated the feasibility of EdgeSRIE for real-time, high-quality ultrasound imaging in resource-limited environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03937
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EdgeSRIE: A hybrid deep learning framework for real-time speckle reduction and image enhancement on portable ultrasound systems
Cho, Hyunwoo
Lee, Jongsoo
Kang, Jinbum
Yoo, Yangmo
Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Speckle patterns in ultrasound images often obscure anatomical details, leading to diagnostic uncertainty. Recently, various deep learning (DL)-based techniques have been introduced to effectively suppress speckle; however, their high computational costs pose challenges for low-resource devices, such as portable ultrasound systems. To address this issue, EdgeSRIE, which is a lightweight hybrid DL framework for real-time speckle reduction and image enhancement in portable ultrasound imaging, is introduced. The proposed framework consists of two main branches: an unsupervised despeckling branch, which is trained by minimizing a loss function between speckled images, and a deblurring branch, which restores blurred images to sharp images. For hardware implementation, the trained network is quantized to 8-bit integer precision and deployed on a low-resource system-on-chip (SoC) with limited power consumption. In the performance evaluation with phantom and in vivo analyses, EdgeSRIE achieved the highest contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and average gradient magnitude (AGM) compared with the other baselines (different 2-rule-based methods and other 4-DL-based methods). Furthermore, EdgeSRIE enabled real-time inference at over 60 frames per second while satisfying computational requirements (< 20K parameters) on actual portable ultrasound hardware. These results demonstrated the feasibility of EdgeSRIE for real-time, high-quality ultrasound imaging in resource-limited environments.
title EdgeSRIE: A hybrid deep learning framework for real-time speckle reduction and image enhancement on portable ultrasound systems
topic Image and Video Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03937