Amplitude and phase estimator combined with the Wiener postfilter for medical ultrasound imaging

Abstract

The adaptive amplitude and phase estimator (APES) has been introduced in medical ultrasound imaging to calculate the amplitude of the desired signal more robustly than other adaptive beamformers like minimum variance (MV). This beamformer minimizes the optimization problem of MV by replacing the estimated array covariance matrix by the interferences plus noise covariance matrix. On the other hand, the Wiener postfilter as a post-weighting factor, which will be multiplied to the final weight vector of the beamformer, estimates the power of the desired signal and the power of the interferences plus noise to improve the contrast.