Despeckling of Optical Coherence Tomography Images: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Optical coherence tomography images are susceptible to speckle noise which affects the interpretation and analysis of internal structures of specimens. Speckle noise reduction is an important prerequisite, whenever coherent imaging is used for tissue characterization. The speckle pattern depends on the structure of the image tissue and various imaging parameters. Denoising techniques are aimed at removing noise or distortion from images while retaining the original quality of the image. This paper examines the performance of some spatial domain linear and non-linear filters in denoising an OCT image. A comparative study is made on the performance of these filters which is expected to remove the speckle noise from the image while preserving the edges. Various image metrics are used to evaluate the performance of the denoising filters. The comparison shows that bilateral filter performs better than other denoising filters.