Performance analysis of the cepstral technique for frequency-domain optical-coherence tomography

Recently, we proposed a noniterative cepstral technique for exact signal recovery in frequency-domain optical-coherence tomography. In this paper, we address the influence of measurement noise on the performance of the method. We derive analytical expressions for the bias and variance of the tomogram under a small noise approximation, and show that our technique yields unbiased and consistent estimators, which have a variance that is proportional to that of the noise and inversely proportional to the data size. We present simulation results to confirm the theoretical derivations. We also derive approximate Cramer-Rao bounds (CRBs) on the achievable accuracy of reconstruction.