  The detection of exoplanets in coronographic images is severely limited by
residual starlight speckles. Dedicated post-processing can drastically reduce
this "stellar leakage" and thereby increase the faintness of detectable
exoplanets. Based on a multi-spectral series expansion of the diffraction
pattern, we derive a multi-mode model of the residuals which can be exploited
to estimate and thus remove the residual speckles in multi-spectral
coronographic images. Compared to other multi-spectral processing methods, our
model is physically grounded and is suitable for use in an (optimal) inverse
approach. We demonstrate the ability of our model to correctly estimate the
speckles in simulated data and demonstrate that very high contrasts can be
achieved. We further apply our method to removing speckles from a real data
cube obtained with the SPHERE IFS instrument.
