Guided filtering-based nonlocal means despeckling of optical coherence tomography images

This Letter presents a guided filtering (GF)-based nonlocal means (NLM) method for despeckling of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Unlike existing NLM methods that determine weights using image intensities or features, the proposed method first uses the GF to capture both grayscale information and features of the input image and then introduces them into the NLM for accurate weight computation. The boosting and iterative strategies are further incorporated to ensure despeckling performance. Experiments on the real OCT images demonstrate that our method outperforms the compared methods by delivering sufficient noise reduction and preserving image details well.