Open Access Paper
19 February 2010 Three-dimensional speckle suppression in optical coherence tomography based on the curvelet transform
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Abstract
Optical coherence tomography is an emerging non-invasive technology that provides high resolution, cross-sectional tomographic images of internal structures of specimens. It holds great potentials for a wide variety of applications, especially in the field of biomedical imaging. OCT images, however, are usually degraded by significant speckle noise. Here we report a 3D approach to attenuating speckle noise in OCT images. This approach is based on the 3D curvelet transform, and is conveniently controlled by a single parameter that determines the threshold in the curvelet domain. Unlike 2D approaches which only consider information in individual images, 3D processing, by analyzing all images in a volume simultaneously, has the advantage of also taking the information between images into account. This, coupled with the curvelet transform's nearly optimal sparse representation of curved edges that are common in OCT images, provides a simple yet powerful platform for speckle attenuation. We show the approach suppresses a significant amount of speckle noise, and in the mean time preserves and thus reveals many subtle features that could get attenuated in other approaches.
© (2010) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Lingfeng Yu, Zhongping Jian, Bin Rao, Bruce J. Tromberg, and Zhongping Chen "Three-dimensional speckle suppression in optical coherence tomography based on the curvelet transform", Proc. SPIE 7554, Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine XIV, 75542Y (19 February 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.841326
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Cited by 21 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Optical coherence tomography

Speckle

3D image processing

Image processing

Signal attenuation

Signal processing

Interference (communication)

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