Hybrid speckle reduction filter for corneal OCT images

Abstract

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging device helpful in capturing the layers of cornea and retina. The OCT images are supportive in understanding the health of an eye during the surgical assessment. Due to the movement of scattering waves from the OCT device, the captured images are usually disturbed with speckle noise. The paper suggests an efficient hybrid filtering technique by combining anisotropic filter, Gaussian filter and bilateral filter to reduce the speckle noise present in the corneal OCT images. The proposed technique is compared with the existing filtering techniques in terms of coefficient correlation and PSNR ratio for performance evaluation.