Abstract: Ultrasonic images are enhanced by applying to the images asymmetric balanced gradient operators or masks which are formed to produce values which are maximized at the edges of spots having a predetermined size and location relative to the mask, which spots have a high likelihood of being specular targets. The gradient operators are further formed to produce minimum values for smaller spots corresponding to acoustic speckle. In the resultant image, the edges of specular targets are enhanced and acoustic speckle is substantially eliminated. Ultrasonic images may be processed in real time with the gradient operators in either an image processing computer or in a hardware pipeline processor.