Proceedings Article | 28 September 2006
Proc. SPIE. 6402, Optics and Photonics for Counterterrorism and Crime Fighting II
KEYWORDS: Light sources, Biometrics, Imaging systems, Cameras, Optical coherence tomography, Skin, Image resolution, Tomography, Information security, 3D image processing
The optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging technology for high-resolution cross-sectional imaging of 3D
structures. In the past years, OCT systems have been used mainly for medical, especially ophthalmological diagnostics.
Concerning the nature of OCT system being capable to explore the internal features of an object, we apply the OCT
technology to directly retrieve the 2D information pre-stored in a multiple-layer information carrier. The standard depth-resolution
of an OCT system is at micrometer level. If a 20mm by 20mm sampling area with a 1024 x 1024 CCD array is
used in the OCT system having 10 μm, an information carrier having a volume of 20mm x 20mm x 2mm could contain
200 Mega-pixel images. Because of its tiny size and large information volume, the information carrier, with its OCT
retrieving system, will have potential applications in documents security and object identification. In addition, as the
information carrier can be made by low-scattering transparent material, the signal/noise ratio will be improved
dramatically. As a consequence, the specific hardware and complicated software can also be greatly simplified. Owing to
non-scanning along X-Y axis, the full-field OCT could be the simplest and most economic imaging system for extracting
information from such a multilayer information carrier. In this paper, deign and implementation of a full-field OCT
system is described and the related algorithms are introduced. In our experiments, a four layers information carrier is
used, which contains 4 layers of image pattern, two text images and two fingerprint images. The extracted tomography
images of each layer are also provided.
