Image-guided computational holographic wavefront shaping

Abstract

Optical imaging through scattering media is important in a variety of fields ranging from microscopy to autonomous vehicles. Although advanced wavefront shaping techniques have offered several breakthroughs in the past decade, current techniques still require a known guide star and a high-resolution spatial light modulator or a very large number of measurements and are limited in their correction field of view. Here we introduce a guide-star-free, non-invasive approach that can correct more than 190,000 scattered modes using only 25 incoherently compounded, holographically measured, scattered light fields, obtained under unknown random illuminations. This is achieved by computationally emulating an image-guided wavefront shaping experiment, where several virtual spatial light modulators are simultaneously optimized to maximize the reconstructed image quality. Our method shifts the burden from the physical hardware to a digital, naturally parallelizable computational optimization, leveraging state-of-the-art automatic differentiation tools. We demonstrate the flexibility and generality of this framework by applying it to imaging through various complex samples and imaging modalities, including epi-illumination, anisoplanatic multi-conjugate correction of highly scattering layers, lensless endoscopy in multicore fibres and acousto-optic tomography. The presented approach offers high versatility, effectiveness and generality for fast, non-invasive imaging in diverse applications.