US Patent 8939582 Optical coherence tomography with dynamic focus sweeping and windowed averaging

During scan capture with an OCT imaging system, the focal plane position can be simultaneously shifted over at least a portion of an image range. As a result, a plurality of image frames respectively corresponding to various focal plane positions is acquired. The image frames can be combined to generate a composite image having suitable resolution throughout the image range, including regions associated with weak-intensity or low-reflectance features. Further, windowed averaging can be performed prior to generation of the composite image so that the composite image incorporates weights given to image data in focus.