Enhanced low-rank + sparsity decomposition for speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography

Speckle artifacts can strongly hamper quantitative analysis of optical coherence tomography (OCT), which is necessary to provide assessment of ocular disorders associated with vision loss. Here, we introduce a method for speckle reduction, which leverages from low-rank + sparsity decomposition (LRpSD) of the logarithm of intensity OCT images. In particular, we combine nonconvex regularization-based low-rank approximation of an original OCT image with a sparsity term that incorporates the speckle. State-of-the-art methods for LRpSD require a priori knowledge of a rank and approximate it with nuclear norm, which is not an accurate rank indicator. As opposed to that, the proposed method provides more accurate approximation of a rank through the use of nonconvex regularization that induces sparse approximation of singular values. Furthermore, a rank value is not required to be known a priori. This, in turn, yields an automatic and computationally more efficient method for speckle reduction, which yields the OCT image with improved contrast-to-noise ratio, contrast and edge fidelity. The source code will be available at www.mipav.net/English/research/research.html.