Glare suppression by coherence gated negation

TL;DR

The paper introduces coherence gated negation (CGN), a novel optical interference technique that actively suppresses glare to enhance imaging of weak targets behind scattering media, outperforming traditional methods in certain scenarios.

Contribution

The paper presents a new coherence gating method, CGN, which actively cancels glare through destructive interference, differing from conventional coherence gating that only isolates signals.

Findings

CGN suppresses glare by an order of magnitude.

CGN outperforms conventional coherence gating in specific scenarios.

Active gating improves imaging of weak targets behind scattering media.

Abstract

Imaging of a weak target hidden behind a scattering medium can be significantly confounded by glare. We report a method, termed coherence gated negation (CGN), that uses destructive optical interference to suppress glare and allow improved imaging of a weak target. As a demonstration, we show that by permuting through a set range of amplitude and phase values for a reference beam interfering with the optical field from the glare and target reflection, we can suppress glare by an order of magnitude, even when the optical wavefront is highly disordered. This strategy significantly departs from conventional coherence gating methods in that CGN actively 'gates out' the unwanted optical contributions while conventional methods 'gate in' the target optical signal. We further show that the CGN method can outperform conventional coherence gating image quality in certain scenarios by more effectively rejecting unwanted optical contributions.