Complex conjugate term manipulation in optical frequency-domain imaging using the time-frequency distribution

We discuss two methods which use the intrinsic dispersion imbalance between interferometer arms in order to address and manipulate the complex conjugate terms in spectral domain optical coherence tomography. Using projections of the time-frequency plane, we can manipulate small induced dispersion and obtain similar modification of the complex conjugate term as large amount of chromatic dispersion. The algorithm described spreads the energy of the complex conjugate term over the entire A-scan. The method is applied to simulated OCT depth signals and offered a mirror term suppression of 20 dB. The second method shows how we can use the time-frequency distribution to filter the mirror terms for a pre-configured depth range about zero path length.