Enhanced low-rank + sparsity decomposition for speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography

J Biomed Opt. 2016 Jul 1;21(7):76008. doi: 10.1117/1.JBO.21.7.076008.

Abstract

Speckle artifacts can strongly hamper quantitative analysis of optical coherence tomography (OCT), which is necessary to provide assessment of ocular disorders associated with vision loss. Here, we introduce a method for speckle reduction, which leverages from low-rank + sparsity decomposition (LRpSD) of the logarithm of intensity OCT images. In particular, we combine nonconvex regularization-based low-rank approximation of an original OCT image with a sparsity term that incorporates the speckle. State-of-the-art methods for LRpSD require a priori knowledge of a rank and approximate it with nuclear norm, which is not an accurate rank indicator. As opposed to that, the proposed method provides more accurate approximation of a rank through the use of nonconvex regularization that induces sparse approximation of singular values. Furthermore, a rank value is not required to be known a priori. This, in turn, yields an automatic and computationally more efficient method for speckle reduction, which yields the OCT image with improved contrast-to-noise ratio, contrast and edge fidelity. The source code will be available at www.mipav.net/English/research/research.html.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Artifacts
  • Programming Languages
  • Tomography, Optical Coherence / methods*
  • Tomography, Optical Coherence / standards*