Full-field spatially incoherent illumination interferometry: a spatial resolution almost insensitive to aberrations

We show that with spatially incoherent illumination, the point spread function (PSF) width/spatial resolution of an imaging interferometer like that used in full-field optical coherence tomography (OCT) is almost insensitive to aberrations. In these systems, aberrations mostly induce a reduction of the signal level that leads to a loss of the signal-to-noise ratio without broadening the system PSF. This is demonstrated by comparison with traditional scanning OCT and wide-field OCT with spatially coherent illuminations. Theoretical analysis and numerical calculation as well as experimental results are provided to show this specific merit of incoherent illumination in full-field OCT. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a result has been demonstrated.