A complex diffusion based nonlinear filter for speckle reduction from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images

Abstract

In this paper, a complex diffusion based nonlinear filter for speckle reduction from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is proposed in a variational framework. The speckle noise pattern in optical coherence tomography images follows Rayleigh's probability distribution function (pdf). The initial condition of the proposed filter is the speckle noised OCT images and output is the better quality speckle reduced image. For digital implementations, the proposed scheme is discretized using finite differences scheme. The performance comparison in terms of improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the proposed scheme with other standard speckle reduction techniques such as Lee filter, Frost filter, Kuan filter, SRAD filter, homomorphic Wiener filter and homomorphic versions of anisotropic diffusion based filter and nonlinear complex diffusion based filter, and another proposed anisotropic diffusion based filter is presented. The obtained shows the efficacy of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2011 ACM.