Metrological performance analysis of optical coherent tomography

A spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) system with 1555 nm center wavelength is tested for stability and accuracy from the micron level to the sub-micron level. The energy centrobaric correction method is used to extract the sub-axial-resolution information as the optical path difference, i.e., the topographic height. We compared the used algorithm with the widely applied phase slope method. The stability of a point scanning OCT system in Michelson style is experimentally compared with that of a system in Fizeau style. Several simple and complicated samples are measured and compared. Finally, we compare the topographic performance of the OCT system with a commercial confocal microscope and white-light interferometer (WLI).