The wall filter is designed to exclude Doppler signals with low frequency, and high amplitude (highpass filter) from moving tissue, such as a vessel wall. Wall filter performance is critical for effectiveness of a color Doppler system.

A filter in electronics is a circuit that only passes certain signals. In ultrasound is a filter a device to suppress acoustic or electromagnetic waves of certain frequencies, letting other frequencies pass, e.g. high pass filter, low pass filter. The high pass filter is the wall filter (also called thump filter) used in Doppler devices to eliminate low frequency Doppler shifts caused by clutter. For blood flow measurement, a low pass filter is often used to strip out high frequency noise, leaving only the biological components of interest. Frame averaging is a form of a low pass filter.