Motion artifact correction using normalized cross-correlation of cropped B-scans

Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) images are susceptible to motion artifacts caused by slightly jitter, which was derived mainly from the heartbeat and respiration of live samples. These motion artifacts lead to a greater degree of decorrelation in static tissues compared to vascular regions, while the unwanted strip artifacts are presented in en-face images of OCTA. In this paper, we propose an additional gradient analysis for surface identification as part of the pre-processing stage using conventional normalized cross-correlation correction algorithm. Subsequently, the upper and lower surfaces of OCT structures were utilized to extract B-scans containing only the static tissue and blood vessel region. The results demonstrated that the normalized cross-correlation of cropped B-scans presents better motion artifact correction performance than the normalized cross-correlation of successive entire B-scans.