Transactions on Machine Intelligence

Transactions on Machine Intelligence

Speckle Noise Reduction in Optical Coherence Tomography Images Using a Combination of Edge-Preserving Filters and Discrete Wavelet Transform

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
A. Fahmi Jafarqulukhani 1
M. Ghiyami 2
S. Jafari Namin 3
1 Department of Biomedical Engineering-Bioelectric, Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran
2 Assitant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Ardabil Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ardabil, Iran
3 Department of Electrical Engineering, Ardabil Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ardabil, Iran
10.47176/TMI.2019.59
Abstract
Imaging techniques are repeatedly employed by radiologists to detect internal structural details and body function. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a significant non-invasive medical imaging modality used to examine the microstructure of biological tissues. In this study, images from 500 patients who visited Noor Clinic in Ardabil for OCT imaging of the retina were collected. Since OCT images suffer from speckle noise, edge-preserving filters were utilized for noise reduction. By subtracting the output of the filtered image from the original image, some of the original image information and noise remained in the output. To restore the remaining information, the output resulting from subtracting the original image from the filtered image was decomposed using the discrete wavelet transform and soft thresholding, and the remaining image information was added to the filtered image. Among the edge-preserving filters, the guided filter demonstrated the best performance with MSE, PSNR, and IQI values of 79.949, 28.41, and 0.984, respectively, whereas the proposed method achieved values of 19.825, 33.78, and 0.989, respectively. After extracting the image information and restoring it to the output of the edge-preserving filters, significant changes in quantitative noise reduction metrics were observed. Consequently, in this study, by employing guided, bilateral, and db8 wavelet filters, we achieved better performance in preserving the edges of OCT images compared to edge-preserving filters.
Keywords
Medical Image Processing
Discrete Wavelet Transform
Noise Reduction
Edge-Preserving Filter
Retinal Layers
Optical Coherence Tomography
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Transactions on Machine Intelligence
Volume 2, Issue 2
Spring 2019
Pages 59-75

  • Receive Date 10 April 2019
  • Revise Date 03 May 2019
  • Accept Date 08 June 2019