Signal Averaging Improves Signal-to-noise in OCT Images: But Which Approach Works Best, and When?

Overview

Journal Biomed Opt Express

Specialty Radiology

Date 2019 Dec 5

PMID 31799045

Citations 18

Authors

Bernhard Baumann

Conrad W Merkle

Rainer A Leitgeb

Marco Augustin

Andreas Wartak

Michael Pircher

Christoph K Hitzenberger

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The high acquisition speed of state-of-the-art optical coherence tomography (OCT) enables massive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvements by signal averaging. Here, we investigate the performance of two commonly used approaches for OCT signal averaging. We present the theoretical SNR performance of (a) computing the average of OCT magnitude data and (b) averaging the complex phasors, and substantiate our findings with simulations and experimentally acquired OCT data. We show that the achieved SNR performance strongly depends on both the SNR of the input signals and the number of averaged signals when the signal bias caused by the noise floor is not accounted for. Therefore we also explore the SNR for the two averaging approaches after correcting for the noise bias and, provided that the phases of the phasors are accurately aligned prior to averaging, then find that complex phasor averaging always leads to higher SNR than magnitude averaging.

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