Coherent synthetic aperture imaging for visible remote sensing via reflective Fourier ptychography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel reflective Fourier ptychography technique for visible light remote sensing, enabling high-resolution, wide FOV imaging with phase recovery, potentially replacing adaptive optics in atmospheric turbulence correction.

Contribution

It presents the first coherent synthetic aperture imaging method for visible light using reflective Fourier ptychography, achieving significant resolution enhancement and noise suppression.

Findings

Spatial resolution improved from 15.6 um to 3.48 um

Speckle noise can be suppressed by Fourier ptychography

Method may replace adaptive optics for turbulence correction

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can measure the phase with antenna and microwave, which cannot be directly extended to visible light imaging due to phase lost. In this letter, we reported an active remote sensing with visible light via reflective Fourier ptychography (FP), termed coherent synthetic aperture imaging (CSAI), achieving high resolution, wide field-of-view (FOV) and phase recovery. A proof-of-concept experiment was reported with laser scanning and a collimator for the infinite object. Both smooth and rough objects are tested, and the spatial resolution increased from 15.6 um to 3.48 um with a factor of 4.5. The speckle noise can be suppressed by FP unexpectedly. Meanwhile, the CSAI method may replace the adaptive optics to tackle the aberration induced from atmospheric turbulence and optical system by one-step deconvolution.