The future of terahertz and infrared imaging is an exciting one, and rife with applications in biosensing, all-weather navigation, security scanning, and much more. Our group capitalizes on metamaterial frequency scalability by employing metamaterials resonant in the far-infrared, or terahertz, region of the electromagnetic spectrum, where sources, detectors, and modulators have thus far proven difficult to create. Our work, in part, has gone into the development of metamaterial spatial light modulators (SLM) for use in single pixel imaging. Recent advances have begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with metamaterials, and many significant advances are still to come. Metamaterial-based systems and devices have already demonstrated an impressive breadth and depth of capability, and have the potential to truly revolutionize imaging at long wavelengths.
Major Research Areas
Single pixel imaging and compressive sensing
The availability of a SLM permits an alternative method of imaging utilization only one detector rather than an array of detector pixels. The key to single pixel imaging is spatial encoding at the SLM plane, where the image is built up from a number of different encoded measurements. For example, if one desire to acquire an image with M pixels, one will display M different patterns on the SLM and collect a single detector value for each. Compressive sensing approaches for single pixel imaging use less than the full set of M measurements for image reconstruction.
Parallel Coded Aperature Imaging
Fully determinant single pixel image reconstruction require that the number of acquisitions be equal to the desired pixel resolution of the image. Thus for sufficently large image sizes acquisition times could become impractical. Our work takes inspiration from communication multiplexing techniques, such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and quadrature modulation, to multiplex multiple masks simultaneously leading to a significant increase in imaging frame rates.