Retinalike Foveated Imaging through an Opaque Scattering Medium

Abstract

Imaging through an opaque scattering medium, such as biological tissue, is of broad interest for many applications from physics to life sciences. Measuring the transmission matrix (TM) of the scattering medium is a versatile tool for this purpose. Previously, researchers are used to improving the image resolution by measuring a gigantic TM with a long sampling time. However, the low resolution and low SNR of the reconstructed images are still two obstacles to the adoption of such a technique. The foveal centralis of the human eye produces sharper vision than that from the retina's peripheral region. Inspired by this feature, we report the implementation of foveated scattering imaging with a multiresolution TM whose space-variant resolution feature can be flexibly adjusted. The enhancement of linear resolution and SNR of the foveated scattering imaging system by factors of 4 and 8.3, respectively, is demonstrated experimentally. Our bioinspired imaging method heuristically introduces foveal vision into scattering imaging, and thus paves the way for both high resolution and high SNR imaging through scattering medium concurrently monitoring the entire field of view.