High-quality photon-limited imaging through dynamic and complex scattering media with a single-photon detector

Abstract

Recent advances in single-photon detectors have enabled low-light detection in diverse applications ranging from biological imaging to astronomy. However, it remains a challenge to realizing high-quality optical imaging through dynamic and complex scattering media under photon-limited conditions. In this paper, we report high-quality photon-limited imaging through dynamic and complex scattering media using a single-photon detector. To eliminate a series of dynamic scaling factors induced by complex scattering in dynamic media, an iterative algorithm is developed to retrieve an estimated object image and a series of corrected measurements, revealing a correlation relationship between the illumination patterns and corrected measurements. Then, the estimated object image and corrected measurements are fed to an untrained neural network powered by regularization with denoising for quality enhancement. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can be applied to implement high-quality photon-limited imaging through complex scattering media at low-light levels. This work opens up an avenue for exploring photon-limited imaging in challenging environments with a single-photon detector.