Speckle reduction and cartoon-texture decomposition of ophthalmic optical coherence tomography images by variational image decomposition

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides high resolution, cross-sectional tomographic images of internal structures of specimens, with wide application in ophthalmology. OCT images, however, are usually degraded by significant speckle noise. Development of successful speckle noise reduction algorithms while preserving fine details of image for ophthalmic OCT is particularly challenging, because of the difficulty in separating the noise and the information parts of a speckle pattern. In this paper we presented a new speckle reduction and cartoon-texture decomposition method of ophthalmic OCT images by using variational image decomposition. Experimental results show that the proposed method could decompose the ophthalmic OCT images into cartoon part, texture part and speckle noise part. Further it is also shown the advantage of variational image decomposition in the speckle reduction of ophthalmic OCT images.