Numerical focusing methods for full field OCT: A comparison based on a common signal model

In this paper a theoretical model of the full field swept source (FF SS) OCT signal is presented based on the angular spectrum wave propagation approach which accounts for the defocus error with imaging depth. It is shown that using the same theoretical model of the signal, numerical defocus correction methods based on a simple forward model (FM) and inverse scattering (IS), the latter being similar to interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM), can be derived. Both FM and IS are compared quantitatively with sub-aperture based digital adaptive optics (DAO). FM has the least numerical complexity, and is the fastest in terms of computational speed among the three. SNR improvement of more than 10 dB is shown for all the three methods over a sample depth of 1.5 mm. For a sample with non-uniform refractive index with depth, FM and IS both improved the depth of focus (DOF) by a factor of 7× for an imaging NA of 0.1. DAO performs the best in case of non-uniform refractive index with respect to DOF improvement by 11×. © 2014 Optical Society of America.