Axial and horizontal registration guided speckle suppression in single-line HD mode for retinal optical coherence tomography images

We propose an image registration method to suppress the speckle noise in retinal optical coherence tomography(OCT) adapted to single-line HD mode hardware implementation. In single-line HD mode, multiple cross-section images at the same straight scan line are obtained repeatedly and rapidly for averaging the speckle noise. Not like static objects, cross-section retinal images are often blurred by direct averaging due to unintentional eye/head motions in axial and horizontal directions. An image registration method which combines regularized dynamic programming algorithm with hill-climbing algorithm is demonstrated to correct axial and lateral motion shifts efficiently. The unaligned images are discarded automatically ...