# Imaging Through Noise With Quantum Illumination

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the first full-field quantum illumination imaging system that significantly improves image contrast and noise rejection, even under environmental noise and transmission losses, enabling practical quantum imaging applications.

## Contribution

It introduces a full-field quantum illumination imaging system with enhanced detection, achieving high noise rejection and contrast improvement resilient to environmental noise and losses.

## Key findings

- Achieved background rejection of about 5 times
- Reported image contrast improvement up to 5.5 times
- Demonstrated robustness to environmental noise and transmission losses

## Abstract

The contrast of an image can be degraded by the presence of background light and sensor noise. To overcome this degradation, quantum illumination protocols have been theorised (Science 321 (2008), Physics Review Letters 101 (2008)) that exploit the spatial correlations between photon-pairs. Here we demonstrate the first full-field imaging system using quantum illumination, by an enhanced detection protocol. With our current technology we achieve a rejection of background and stray light of order 5 and also report an image contrast improvement up to a factor of 5.5, which is resilient to both environmental noise and transmission losses. The quantum illumination protocol differs from usual quantum schemes in that the advantage is maintained even in the presence of noise and loss. Our approach may enable laboratory-based quantum imaging to be applied to real-world applications where the suppression of background light and noise is important, such as imaging under low-photon flux and quantum LIDAR.