The study suggests a new approach to segment the ultrasound
uterus images to obtain the fetus region. The approach consists of
three stages. The first includes the preprocessing in which the
speckle noise is removed from the ultrasound images depe
nding on
sequential filtering of Gabor filter and median filter. Second, an
improved active shape contour independent of edges is applied to
segment the uterus images. The last stage is the post processing
which depends on the morphological operation to eliminate the
undesired region and obtain the region of interest (fetus).
The designed system has been tested by means of medical database
of ultrasound uterus images downloaded from the ULTRASCAN
CENTRE site in Kaloor (India). The experimental tests show that
the proposed sequential filtering technique improves the active
shape contour algorithm performance significantly, so the system
segment the uterus images correctly even in the presence of speckle
noise.
