Circular statistics vector for improving coherent plane wave compounding image in Fourier domain

•The instantaneous phase of the RF signal is regarded as the unit vector on the complex circular plane, and the mean resultant vector is calculated by using the delayed cosine and sine components to establish the circular statistics vector to characterize the consistency of the RF signal distribution.•To solve the problem that the traditional coherence factor is unsuitable for frequency domain, we proposed a circular statistics vector (CSV) weighting Fourier domain (FD) beamforming for ultrasound plane-wave images.•The high image quality and low computational load have been successfully conducted under the proposed CSV weighting method.