Dynamic imaging of distant objects with ptychographical intensity interferometry

Abstract

As a promising lensless imaging method for distant objects, intensity interferometry imaging (III) had been suffering from the unreliable phase retrieval process, hindering the development of III for decades. Recently, the introduction of ptychographic detection in III overcame this challenge, and a method called ptychographic III (PIII) was proposed. We here experimentally demonstrate that PIII can image a dynamic distant object. A reasonable image for the moving object can be retrieved with only two speckle patterns for each probe, and only 10 to 20 iterations are needed. Meanwhile, PIII exhibits robustness to the inaccurate information of the probe. Furthermore, PIII successfully recovers the image through a fog obfuscating the imaging light path, under which a conventional camera relying on lenses fails to provide a recognizable image.