Total Variation Denoising for Optical Coherence Tomography

This paper introduces a new method of combining total variation denoising (TVD) and median filtering to reduce noise in optical coherence tomography (OCT) image volumes. Both noise from image acquisition and digital processing severely degrade the quality of the OCT volumes. The OCT volume consists of the anatomical structures of interest and speckle noise. For denoising purposes we model speckle noise as a combination of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and sparse salt and pepper noise. The proposed method recovers the anatomical structures of interest by using a Median filter to remove the sparse salt and pepper noise and by using TVD to remove the AWGN while preserving the edges in the image. The proposed method reduces noise without much loss in structural detail. When compared to other leading methods, our method produces similar results significantly faster.