Contrast enhancement of polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography skin images

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new imaging technique for observing biological tissue structure. Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) is a functional extension of OCT, which uses polarized light to probe the sample and extract the polarization properties by detecting the change of the polarization state. In the practical application environment, the optical characteristics of biological samples and the instability of the system will reduce the contrast of the image. Traditional contrast enhancement methods are mostly based on histogram equalization and histogram matching to improve the global quality, which causes the loss of some details of the image and the excessive enhancement of noise. To solve this problem, a local contrast enhancement method is proposed in this paper. The target region and the background region are processed differently by threshold segmentation to enhance the contrast of the signal region and restrain the excessive enhancement of the background noise at the same time. The experimental results showed that this method can enhance the contrast of PS-OCT images and improve the image quality effectively. We believe that this method may play an important role in the application of PS-OCT technology in clinical research.