title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Centre of New Technologies for Medicine, Association for Innovation and Biomedical Research on Light and Image, 3000-548 Coimbra, Portugal. prodrigues@aibili.pt
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rodrigues
authors.forename: Rui
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bernardes
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004058:Diffusion; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D012160:Retina / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000737:chemistry; D041623:Tomography, Optical Coherence / Q000379:methods*