Large Area Full-Field Optical Coherence Tomography and its Applications

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) can perform high resolution, cross-sectional tomographic imaging of the internal structure of materials and biological samples. Most of the OCT systems use fibre probe based technology, in which a 3-axis scanning mechanism is needed. As the fibre output aperture is of the order of a micron, the working area of OCT system is normally about hundreds of squared microns. Working directly on a 2D region, Full-Field OCT (FF-OCT) system has parallel processing ability. Because the size of the image does not pose a serious challenge, FF-OCT can be easily used to image a large working area. This paper discusses system design and implementation for a large area FF-OCT. Different applications, 3D intensity imaging, multiple-layer information extraction and fake-fingerprint detection, are described. To further reduce the cost of system and increase and the resolution of depth, FF-OCT system using white light is also introduced.