Phase coherent noise reduction in digital holographic microscopy based on adaptive total variation

•A method to reduce phase coherent noise based on adaptive total variation is proposed.•An image quality evaluation factor which combines the derivative variance correlation quality map and Canny operator is used to guide the adaptive total variation process.•In phase regions with less noise and edges, the details are preserved; and in the phase regions rich of noise and isolated noise pixels, the noise is removed.•The proposed method can both reduce the coherent noise and preserve edges. Digital holographic microscopy is a new type of quantitative phase imaging tool. It offers non-contact and real-time phase contrast imaging and has been used widely; however, the coherent noise degrades the imaging quality seriously. A method of reducing phase coherent noise based on adaptive total variation is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, an image quality evaluation factor is used to guide the adaptive total variation process. The quality evaluation factor divides the phase image into high quality regions and low quality regions. In high quality regions, the details are preserved; and in low quality regions, the coherent noise is removed. The proposed method can reduce the coherent noise of the phase image and preserve some details well. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.