Despeckling vs Averaging of retinal UHROCT tomograms: advantages and limitations

摘要

Imaging time can be reduced using despeckled tomograms, which have similar image metrics to those obtained by averaging several low speed tomograms or many high speed tomograms. Quantitative analysis was used to compare the performance of two speckle denoising approaches, algorithmic despeckling and frame averaging, as applied to retinal OCT images. Human retinal tomograms were acquired from healthy subjects with a research grade 1060nm spectral domain UHROCT system with 5μm axial resolution in the retina. Single cross-sectional retinal tomograms were processed with a novel speckle denoising algorithm and compared with frame averaged retinal images acquired at the same location. Image quality metrics such as the image SNR, and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) were evaluated for both cases.