3-D adaptive nonlinear complex-diffusion despeckling filter.

Abstract

This work aims to improve the process of speckle noise reduction while preserving edges and other relevant features through filter expansion from 2-D to 3-D. Despeckling is very important for data visual inspection and as a preprocessing step for other algorithms, as they are usually notably influenced by speckle noise. To that intent, a 3-D approach is proposed for the adaptive complex-diffusion filter. This 3-D iterative filter was applied to spectral-domain optical coherence tomography medical imaging volumes of the human retina and a quantitative evaluation of the results was performed to allow a demonstration of the better performance of the 3-D over the 2-D filtering and to choose the best total diffusion time. In addition, we propose a fast graphical processing unit parallel implementation so that the filter can be used in a clinical setting.