Fig. 1.

Statistical characteristics of noise in OCT. (a) Simulated interferogram with added Gaussian noise from a single reflective surface (red solid line). The black solid line is the noise free interferogram. The shaded area depicts S.D. of the added noise, which corresponds to SNR = 30 dB for the reconstructed image; (b) The distribution of the corresponding non-DC peak values on the 2D complex plane after discrete Fourier transform reconstruction. The insert shows the spatial distribution of the complex values in the 2D plane, which were tested to follow bi-variate normal distribution. (c) The distribution of the modulus r. The solid line is generated using the data from (a) and (b). The dashed line showed a non-symmetrical case where SNR was much worse (10 dB).