METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR GENERATING LARGE COMPOUND ULTRASOUND IMAGE

An image registration method and apparatus is provided in which consecutive ultrasonic image frames are correlated in order to derive transducer motion information. Since ultrasonic images from real-time scanning operations are highly correlated from one frame to another, the individual images can be divided into several smaller sub-image regions and a very fast and robust image motion detection algorithm utilized to measure the sub-image motion. This algorithm uses a fast adaptive coarse/fine minimum-sum-absolute-difference (MSAD) search strategy to compute an initial estimation of the local motion vectors. The initial estimation is combined with two measurement parameters by use of a fuzzy logic technique to derive a final estimation of the local motion vectors. The final local motion vectors are applied to a least-squares (L-S) process in order to estimate global image motion. Finally, a fast display technique generates compound images based on the derived global image motion.