Non-invasive imaging through random media

Abstract: When waves propagate through a strongly scattering medium the energy is transferred to the incoherent wave part by scattering. The wave intensity then forms a random speckle pattern seemingly without much useful information. However, a number of recent physical experiments show how one can extract useful information from this speckle pattern. Here we present the mathematical analysis that explains the quite stunning performance of such a scheme for speckle imaging. Our analysis identifies a scaling regime where the scheme works well. This regime is the white-noise paraxial regime, which leads to the Ito-Schrodinger model for the wave amplitude. The results presented in this paper conform with the sophisticated physical intuition that has motivated these schemes, but give a more detailed characterization of the performance. The analysis gives a description of (i) the information that can be extracted and with what resolution (ii) the statistical stability or signal-to-noise ratio with which the information can be extracted.