In most coherent imaging modality, speckle noise is a major cause that blurs the boundary of tissues and degrades the image contrast. By utilizing the unique properties of supercontinuum (SC) generated by noise-like pulses (NLPs) and a simple multi-frame averaging technique, we achieved significant speckle reduction in spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). We quantitatively compared the speckle of our proposed method with those of conventional swept source OCT (SS-OCT) and SD-OCT based on commercial light sources. The experimental results show that SC pumped by NLPs combined with noncoherent averaging method achieves better denoising performance in terms of contrast to noise ratio (CNR).

类噪声脉冲(NLP)是锁模激光器在一定条件下生成的一种特殊脉冲，具有能量高、脉宽宽、相干性低等特点。近年来，由于稀土元素掺杂技术、锁模技术和光纤放大技术的不断发展以及抽运能量的不断提升，类噪声脉冲光纤激光器得到了迅速发展。基于此，描述了使用不同锁模技术、工作在不同色散区的类噪声脉冲光纤激光器。依据其脉冲产生机理、脉冲光学性质等特点进行分类叙述，综述了国内外这一领域的研究现状及进展。最后，对近年来类噪声脉冲激光器在生产实践中的具体应用进行了简要阐述。