OCT noise despeckling using a 3D nonlinear complex diffusion filter

An improved despeckling method, based on complex diffusion filtering, is herein presented to enhance structure segmentation in high-definition spectral domain optical coherence tomography data. We propose to extend the filter concept from 2- to 3-dimensions, taking into account the consistency of noise along the entire 3D data volume. This method compares favorably to existing methods reducing speckle noise and preserving edges and features.