A swept source OCT at 1300 nm with angular compounding for art and archaeological conservation

We have assembled a swept source optical coherence tomography (OCT) system for use in Art & Archaeological Conservation. The system is illuminated by an in-house swept source with a central wavelength of 1300 nm. This system includes dedicated optics to allow for angular averaging for speckle noise reduction. We demonstrate that the averaging produces significant improvements in speckle SNR in art and archaeological type objects and allows easier identification of features. We further demonstrate that there is practically no loss of axial resolution.