US Patent 10145669 Reducing speckle noise in optical coherence tomography images

A method and system are proposed to obtain a reduced speckle noise image of a subject from optical coherence tomography (OCT) image data of the subject. The cross sectional images each comprise a plurality of scan lines obtained by measuring the time delay of light reflected, in a depth direction, from optical interfaces within the subject. The method comprises two aligning steps. First the cross sectional images are aligned, then image patches of the aligned cross sectional images are aligned to form a set of aligned patches. An image matrix is then formed from the aligned patches; and matrix completion is applied to the image matrix to obtain a reduced speckle noise image of the subject.