Towards multi-directional OCT for speckle noise reduction

Abstract

Multi-directional optical coherence tomography (MD-OCT) applies and extends the concept of angular compounding for speckle noise reduction to the area of OCT imaging. OCT images are acquired from a wide range of angles of view. Averaging of the rotated images therefore requires compensation of the parallax which is achieved by simple image registration for image reconstruction. Test measurements of a sample structure in a low and highly scattering environment show that the method improves the signal-to-noise ratio by a factor of 4 and hence reduces speckle noise significantly. Experimental results also show that the proposed averaging increases the performance of common edge-detection algorithms. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.