Abstract
A spatial resolution enhancement technique leveraging smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (SPWVD) for Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SDOCT) is proposed and investigated in this work. SPWVD, commonly used in communications for time-frequency analysis, is adapted here to exploit the apparent non-stationary behavior of SDOCT interferometric signals. This behavior in SDOCT refers to specific frequencies in the signal that remain unresolved when analyzed globally, but become resolved when examined locally using time-frequency tools. Conventional SDOCT utilizes a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract the global frequency content of the signal. The process can potentially miss closely spaced frequencies. In addition, using the FFT method to generate axial scans (A-scan) compromises axial resolution due to the complex conjugate artifact, which uses the N-pixel detector data sub-optimally. The proposed technique analyzes the local spectral characteristics of an N point interferometric signal and generates high resolution A-scans over N samples rather than N/2, thereby overcoming some limitations of the FFT method. The experimental results demonstrate a twofold increase in A-scan resolution, effectively resolving closely spaced layers in the sample. The B-scan images processed with the proposed method also show improved contrast to noise ratio compared to the FFT method enabling high resolution OCT imaging.