Improving image quality in intensity-interferometric spectral-domain optical coherence tomography

Intensity-interferometric spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (I-SD-OCT), devised recently as a classical analog of quantum OCT, enables axially scanless cross-sectional imaging with an immunity to group-velocity dispersion and a factor-of-$\sqrt{2}$ resolution improvement. However, unwanted artifacts inevitably emerge in the resultant image. In this paper, it is demonstrated theoretically and experimentally that such artifacts can be reduced without any difficulty by means of either a mechanical displacement of the detector for capturing spectral intensity patterns or a numerical displacement of the spectral intensity patterns stored in a computer. Furthermore, it is proved that the I-SD-OCT signal can be extracted from the conventional SD-OCT setup under a certain condition. These two features serve to improve the image quality in I-SD-OCT. (paper)