Statistics and reduction of speckle in optical coherence tomography

Studies have shown that optical coherence tomography (OCT) is useful in imaging microscopic structures through highly scattering media. Because spatially coherent light is used in OCT, speckle in the reconstructed image is unavoidable, resulting in degradation of the quality of the OCT images and impaired ability to differentiate subsurface structures. Therefore speckle reduction is an important issue in OCT imaging. We develop speckle statistics that are appropriate to the OCT measurements and demonstrate a simple and practical speckle-reduction technique. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America. OCIS codes: 170.4500, 110.4500, 030.6140, 120.6150.