Illumination strategies for intensity-only imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel intensity-only imaging method using the time reversal operator and SVD, enabling accurate and noise-robust localization of scatterers without prior information.

Contribution

It presents a new illumination strategy and SVD-based imaging approach for intensity-only measurements in coherent media, ensuring exact recovery in noise-free scenarios.

Findings

Effective imaging with intensity-only data demonstrated through simulations

Method guarantees exact recovery in noise-free conditions

Robust performance observed under additive noise

Abstract

We propose a new strategy for narrow band, active array imaging of localized scat- terers when only the intensities are recorded and measured at the array. We consider a homogeneous medium so that wave propagation is fully coherent. We show that imaging with intensity-only measurements can be carried out using the time reversal operator of the imaging system, which can be obtained from intensity measurements using an appropriate illumination strategy and the polarization identity. Once the time reversal operator has been obtained, we show that the images can be formed using its singular value decomposition (SVD). We use two SVD-based methods to image the scatterers. The proposed approach is simple and efficient. It does not need prior information about the sought image, and guarantees exact recovery in the noise-free case. Furthermore, it is robust with respect to additive noise. Detailed numerical simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed imaging strategy when only the intensities are captured.