Multilevel bidimensional empirical mode decomposition: a new speckle reduction method in digital holography

The paper presents a new automatic technique for speckle reduction in the context of digital holography. Speckle noise is a superposition of unwanted spots over objects of interest, due to the behavior of a coherence source of radiation with the object surface characteristics. In the proposed denoising method, bidimensional empirical mode decomposition is used to decompose the image signal, which is then filtered through the Frost filter. The proposed technique was preliminarily tested on the "Lena" image for quality assessment in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio. Then, its denoising capability was assessed on different holographic images on which also the comparison (using both blind metrics and visual inspection) with the leading strategies in the state of the art was favorably performed. (C) 2014 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)