Denoising based on noise parameter estimation in speckled OCT images using neural network

Abstract

This paper presents a neural network based technique to denoise speckled images in optical coherence tomography (OCT). Speckle noise is modeled as Rayleigh distribution, and the neural network estimates the noise parameter, sigma. Twenty features from each image are used as input for training the neural network, and the sigma value is the single output of the network. The certainty of the trained network was more than 91 percent. The promising image results were assessed with three No-Reference metrics, with the Signal-to-Noise ratio of the denoised image being considerably increased.