Error-Control-Coding Assisted Imaging

Abstract: Error-control-coding (ECC) techniques are widely used in modern digital communication systems to minimize the effect of noisy channels on the quality of received signals. Motivated by the fact that both communication and imaging can be considered as an information transfer process, in this paper we demonstrate that ECC could yield significant improvements in the image quality by reducing the effect of noise in the physical process of image acquisition. In the demonstrated approach, the object is encoded by ECC structured light fields generated by a digital-micromirror-device (DMD) while its image is obtained by decoding the received signal collected by a bucket-detector (BD). By applying a Luby Transform (LT) code as an example, our proof-of-concept experiment validates that the object image can be effectively reconstructed while errors induced by noisy reception can be significantly reduced. The demonstrated approach informs a new imaging technique: ECC assisted imaging, which can be scaled into applications such as remote sensing, spectroscopy and biomedical imaging.