Acousto-optical camera for super-resolution imaging

Abstract

I will present a hybrid acousto-optical imaging system that probes the environment with acoustic waves, converts the back-scattered sound into a coherent optical field on an aperture using an acousto-optical metasurface, and focuses the latter into an image with existing optical lenses. Preliminary theoretical analysis and experiments show that this approach can produce images of significantly higher resolution than possible with conventional methods, thus enabling high quality images produced with low frequency probing sound. Our imaging approach takes advantage of the best properties of optic and acoustic waves, namely, (1) the high image quality produced by existing optical systems and (2) the ability of low frequency acoustic waves to penetrate most materials. An additional advantage of our method is that it puts essentially no constraints on the sound source. For example, the source could have low directivity and may consist of a single transducer or it could even miss when imaging noisy environments. In the latter scenarios, our imaging method becomes purely passive.