High-resolution full-field optical coherence tomography using high dynamic range image processing

Full-field optical coherence tomography (FF-OCT) based on white-light interference microscopy, is an emerging noninvasive imaging technique for characterizing biological tissue or optical scattering media with micrometer resolution. Tomographic images can be obtained by analyzing a sequence of interferograms acquired with a camera. This is achieved by scanning an interferometric microscope objectives along the optical axis and performing appropriate signal processing for fringe envelope extraction, leading to three-dimensional imaging over depth. However, noise contained in the images can hide some important details or induce errors in the size of these details. To firstly reduce temporal and spatial noise from the camera, it is possible to apply basic image post processing methods such as image averaging, dark frame subtraction or flat field division. It has been demonstrate that this can improve the quality of microscopy images by enhancing the signal to noise ratio. In addition, the dynamic range of images can be enhanced to improve the contrast by combining images acquired with different exposure times or light intensity. This can be made possible by applying a hybrid high dynamic range (HDR) technique, which is proposed in this paper. High resolution tomographic analysis is thus performed using a combination of the above-mentioned image processing techniques. As a result, the lateral resolution of the system can be improved so as to approach the diffraction limit of the microscope as well as to increase the power of detection, thus enabling new sub-diffraction sized structures contained in a transparent layer, initially hidden by the noise, to be detected.