Pre- and post-processing for tomographic reconstruction of terahertz time-domain spectroscopy

Reflection-type terahertz tomography is obtained using time-domain spectroscopy. Due to different velocities of the terahertz ray in free space and inside a sample, the tomographic transverse plane is not obtained by a simple reconstruction using time index. A pre-processing method is proposed to compensate for the different velocities of the terahertz ray for tomographic reconstruction. Maximum intensity projection, averaging, and short-time Fourier transform are proposed as post-processing methods along the depth direction for the terahertz tomography. Log-scale display is also suggested for a better visualization. Some experimental results with the pre- and post-processing are demonstrated. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America