In order to get uniform ultrasound images with clear structure, a novel and adaptive ultrasound attenuation compensation method based on image texture analysis was investigated. The attenuation process of acoustic signals transmitted in soft tissue was modeled, with the introduction of tissue attenuation coefficient and depth dependent attenuation compensation. After giving the 2-D co-occurrence matrices and 1-D sum and difference histograms based image texture parameters, the basic idea to precisely estimate tissue attenuation coefficient and properly compensate the attenuated ultrasound power was proposed. Algorithms were verified both in tissue-mimicking phantom with known attenuation coefficient and in vivo ultrasound images acquired from a clinical ultrasound system. Testing results presented accurate tissue attenuation coefficients and also uniform attenuation compensated ultrasound images.
