A nonlocal deep image prior model to restore optical coherence tomographic images from gamma distributed speckle noise

Abstract

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is often employed to observe the retinal layers in the human eyes. The retinal scans are susceptible to artefacts such as head movements or eye blinks. Along with this, the quality of the images is degraded by speckle noise caused due to the constructive and destructive interference of the waves used for capturing data. Recently, image restoration techniques have geared up in terms of quality with the exertion of deep learning. Despeckling using deep learning, in general, necessitates a large set of training images. On the contrary, deep image prior is a novel model that performs denoising operations using a single training image, based on a prior assumption about the noise distribution. This paper extends the concept of the deep image prior towards non-local restoration for speckle noise assuming that the speckle follows Gamma distribution. Such a framework can be incorporated to enhance the OCT images. The proposed framework is assessed qualitatively with visual comparisons and quantitatively using statistical measures like PSNR, CNR and ENL. Comparative studies confirm that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in restoring speckled input images.