Speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography images using digital filtering

Speckle noise is a ubiquitous artifact that limits the interpretation of optical coherence tomography images. Here we apply various speckle-reduction digital filters to optical coherence tomography images and compare their performance. Our results indicate that shift-invariant, nonorthogonal wavelet-transform-based filters together with enhanced Lee and adaptive Wiener filters can significantly reduce speckle and increase the signal-to-noise ratio, while preserving strong edges. The speckle reduction capabilities of these filters are also compared with speckle reduction from incoherent angular compounding. Our results suggest that by using these digital filters, the number of individual angles required to attain a certain level of speckle reduction can be decreased. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.