Tensor Ring Decomposition Guided Dictionary Learning for OCT Image Denoising

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive and effective tool for the imaging of retinal tissue. However, the heavy speckle noise, resulting from multiple scattering of the light waves, obscures important morphological structures and impairs the clinical diagnosis of ocular diseases. In this paper, we propose a novel and powerful model known as tensor ring decomposition-guided dictionary learning (TRGDL) for OCT image denoising, which can simultaneously utilize two useful complementary priors, i.e., three-dimensional low-rank and sparsity priors, under a unified framework. Specifically, to effectively use the strong correlation between nearby OCT frames, we construct the OCT group tensors by extracting cubic patches from OCT images and clustering similar patches. Then, since each created OCT group tensor has a low-rank structure, to exploit spatial, non-local, and its temporal correlations in a balanced way, we enforce the TR decomposition model on each OCT group tensor. Next, to use the beneficial three-dimensional inter-group sparsity, we learn shared dictionaries in both spatial and temporal dimensions from all of the stacked OCT group tensors. Furthermore, we develop an effective algorithm to solve the resulting optimization problem by using two efficient optimization approaches, including proximal alternating minimization and the alternative direction method of multipliers. Finally, extensive experiments on OCT datasets from various imaging devices are conducted to prove the generality and usefulness of the proposed TRGDL model. Experimental simulation results show that the suggested TRGDL model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for OCT image denoising both qualitatively and quantitatively.