Further study of the Singer array in near-field coded aperture imaging for extended sources

Abstract

Although coded aperture imaging (CAI) has been successfully applied in far-field imaging, its near-field applications suffer from significant declines in image quality caused by near-field artifacts, whose characteristics are related to basic coded patterns. In this study, near-field extended-source CAI performances based on the Singer array (SA) are discussed, where a 29 × 33 SA mask is selected in comparison with a single pinhole and a 33 × 33 mask based on the modified uniformly redundant array. Simplified near-field corrections are introduced in the reconstruction process of SA imaging, whose effectiveness in extended-source imaging is discussed through a series of simulations, and high-resolution near-field imaging experiments of sealed sources are conducted for further validation. Moreover, its potential application of nondestructive testing based on Compton scattering tomography is discussed. The simulation and experiment results show potential in SA-based CAI to achieve fast, real-time, and even dynamic high-resolution near-field applications for complicated objects.