Non-Local Mean Denoising Algorithm Based on Fractional Compact Finite Difference Scheme Effectively Reduces Speckle Noise in Optical Coherence Tomography Images

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is used in various fields such, as medical diagnosis and material inspection, as a non-invasive and high-resolution optical imaging modality. However, an OCT image is damaged by speckle noise during its generation, thus reducing the image quality. To address this problem, a non-local means (NLM) algorithm based on the fractional compact finite difference scheme (FCFDS) is proposed to remove the speckle noise in OCT images. FCFDS uses more local pixel information when compared to integer-order difference operators. The FCFDS operator is introduced into the NLM algorithm to construct a high-precision weight calculation so that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the speckle noise in the OCT images. Experiments on simulations and real OCT images show that the proposed method is comparable to other state-of-the-art despeckling methods and can substantially reduce noise and preserve image details such as edges and structures. Speckle noise removal can further promote the application of the proposed algorithm in medical diagnosis and industrial detection, as it has key research value.