1. A method of reducing speckle in an image comprising: detecting the edges of the image to create an edge detected image; binarizing the edge detected image to create a binary edge image for processing; creating a list, L, of connected components in the binary edge image; creating a list, C, of connected components in list L that are smaller than a predetermined number of pixels; determining noise candidate pixels from the edge detected image that are covered by the connected components in list C; computing a histogram h e of the noise candidate pixels; calculating a threshold from the total number of noise candidate pixels; and marking the pixels in the connected components in list C having a pixel intensity smaller than the threshold as noise.