Fiber optic interferometers to sense various physical parameters including temperature, strain, pressure, and refractive index have been widely investigated. They can be categorized into four types: Fabry-Perot, Mach-Zehnder, Michelson, and Sagnac. In this paper, each type of interferometric sensor is reviewed in terms of operating principles, fabrication methods, and application fields. Some specific examples of recently reported interferometeric sensor technologies are presented in detail to show their large potential in practical applications. Some of the simple to fabricate but exceedingly effective Fabry-Perot interferometers, implemented in both extrinsic and intrinsic structures, are discussed. Also, a wide variety of Mach-Zehnder and Michelson interferometric sensors based on photonic crystal fibers are introduced along with their remarkable sensing performances. Finally, the simultaneous multi-parameter sensing capability of a pair of long period fiber grating (LPG) is presented in two types of structures; one is the Mach-Zehnder interferometer formed in a double cladding fiber and the other is the highly sensitive Sagnac interferometer cascaded with an LPG pair.

A method allows the extraction of the recovery factor that maximizes the image contrast of OCT (optical coherence tomography) and/or OCTA (OCT angiography) of a living subject is proposed in this study. Due to the finite depth of focus in imaging optics, the volume OCT imaging suffers from blurriness in the lateral resolution. By utilizing the digital hologram method or angular spectrum method, the blurred image can be refocused. However, for in vivo OCT imaging, evaluation of the image focus is not easy, owing to the cloudy structure of the brain. In the proposed method, the blood flow signals were used as a guiding star to find the recovery factor. The propagation distance to a focal plane was automatically determined by evaluating the contrast of a cross-sectional OCTA image. The performance was examined though in vivo mouse brain OCT/OCTA imaging. The image singularity of the blood flow in OCTA was very effective at evaluating the contrast of the image.