3D Adaptive Nonlinear Complex-Diffusion Despeckling Filter.

Rodrigues P., Bernardes R.

This work aims to improve the process of speckle noise reduction while preserving edges and other relevant features through filter expansion from 2D to 3D. 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 3D approach is proposed for the adaptive complex-diffusion filter. This 3D 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 3D over the 2D 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.

IEEE Trans Med Imaging, 2012, 31(12), 2205-2212.

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2012
http://doi.org/10.1109/TMI.2012.2211609