ULTRASOUND IMAGE ENHANCEMENT USING INTELLIGENT WATER DROPS (IWD)

Intelligent Water Drops algorithm or the IWD algorithm is a swarm-based nature-inspired optimization algorithm. This algorithm contains a few essential elements of natural water drops and actions and reactions that occur between river's bed and the water drops that flow within. The IWD algorithm may fall into the category of Swarm intelligence and Meta-heuristic. Intrinsically the IWD algorithm can be used for combinatorial optimization. However it may be adapted for continuous optimization too. The IWD was first introduced for the traveling salesman problem in 2007. Since then multitude of researchers has focused on improving the algorithm for different problemsAlmost every IWD algorithm is composed of two parts: a graph that plays the role of distributed memory on which soils of different edges are preserved and the moving part of the IWD algorithm which is a few number of intelligent water drops. These Intelligent Water Drops (IWDs) both compete and cooperate to find better solutions and by changing soils of the graph the paths to better solutions become more reachable. It is mentioned that the IWD-based algorithms need at least two IWDs to work.