Significance: Speckle noise limits the diagnostic capabilities of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images, causing both a reduction in contrast and a less accurate assessment of the microstructural morphology of the tissue. Aim: We present a speckle-noise reduction method for OCT volumes that exploits the advantages of adaptive-noise wavelet thresholding with a wavelet compounding method applied to several frames acquired from consecutive positions. The method takes advantage of the wavelet representation of the speckle statistics, calculated properly from a homogeneous sample or a region of the noisy volume. Approach: The proposed method was first compared quantitatively with different state-of-the-art approaches by being applied to three different clinical dermatological OCT volumes with three different OCT settings. The method was also applied to a public retinal spectral-domain OCT dataset to demonstrate its applicability to different imaging modalities. Results: The results based on four different metrics demonstrate that the proposed method achieved the best performance among the tested techniques in suppressing noise and preserving structural information. Conclusions: The proposed OCT denoising technique has the potential to adapt to different image OCT settings and noise environments and to improve image quality prior to clinical diagnosis based on visual assessment.

中文翻译：

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用于光学相干断层扫描图像的自适应复合散斑降噪滤波器

意义：斑点噪声限制了光学相干断层扫描 (OCT) 图像的诊断能力，导致对比度降低和组织微观结构形态的不太准确评估。目的：我们提出了一种用于 OCT 体积的散斑降噪方法，该方法利用了自适应噪声小波阈值化的优点，将小波复合方法应用于从连续位置获取的多个帧。该方法利用散斑统计的小波表示，从均匀样本或噪声体积区域正确计算。方法：首先通过将所提出的方法应用于具有三种不同 OCT 设置的三种不同临床皮肤病学 OCT 体积，将所提出的方法与不同的最先进方法进行定量比较。该方法还应用于公共视网膜光谱域 OCT 数据集，以证明其适用于不同的成像模式。结果：基于四个不同度量的结果表明，所提出的方法在抑制噪声和保留结构信息方面在测试技术中取得了最佳性能。结论：所提出的 OCT 去噪技术有可能适应不同的图像 OCT 设置和噪声环境，并在基于视觉评估的临床诊断之前提高图像质量。基于四种不同度量的结果表明，所提出的方法在抑制噪声和保留结构信息方面在测试技术中取得了最佳性能。结论：所提出的 OCT 去噪技术有可能适应不同的图像 OCT 设置和噪声环境，并在基于视觉评估的临床诊断之前提高图像质量。基于四种不同度量的结果表明，所提出的方法在抑制噪声和保留结构信息方面在测试技术中取得了最佳性能。结论：所提出的 OCT 去噪技术有可能适应不同的图像 OCT 设置和噪声环境，并在基于视觉评估的临床诊断之前提高图像质量。