Sensitivity of synthetic aperture laser optical feedback imaging

TL;DR

This paper compares the sensitivity of direct and synthetic aperture laser optical feedback imaging configurations, highlighting the advantages of synthetic aperture in resolution and 3D imaging despite some photometric drawbacks.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative analysis of LOFI-based direct and synthetic aperture imaging configurations, emphasizing the benefits of synthetic aperture for resolution and 3D imaging.

Findings

Synthetic aperture provides good resolution at high working distances.

LOFI's high sensitivity partially compensates for synthetic aperture's photometric drawbacks.

Synthetic aperture enables single-scan 3D imaging.

Abstract

In this paper we compare the sensitivity of two imaging configurations both based on Laser Optical Feedback Imaging (LOFI). The first one is direct imaging, which uses conventional optical focalisation on target and the second one is made by Synthetic Aperture (SA) Laser, which uses numerical focalisation. We show that SA configuration allows to obtain good resolutions with high working distance and that the drawback of SA imagery is that it has a worse photometric balance in comparison to conventional microscope. This drawback is partially compensated by the important sensitivity of LOFI. Another interest of SA relies on the capacity of getting a 3D information in a single x-y scan.