Spatial Compounding Algorithm for Speckle Reduction of Dynamic Focus OCT Images

Optical coherence tomography is capable of imaging the microstructures within tissues. To preserve the transverse resolution at all imaging depths, we implement a dynamic focusing scheme. To improve the quality of images further, a simple speckle reduction scheme is employed which uses the vibration introduced by the translation stage used for axial scanning. A spatial compounding technique is developed based on co-registration followed by an averaging algorithm. We conclude that the degree of speckle reduction achieved is worth the expense of more complicated processing required.