Snapshot Synthetic Aperture Imaging with Boiling Speckle

Abstract: Light-based synthetic aperture (SA) imaging methods, such as Fourier Ptychography, have brought breakthrough high-resolution wide-field-of-view imaging capabilities to microscopy. While these technologies promise similar improvements in long-range imaging applications, macroscale light-based SA imaging is significantly more challenging. In this work, we first demonstrate that speckle noise is particularly problematic for light-based SA systems. Specifically, we prove that it is fundamentally impossible to perform SA imaging of fully diffuse scenes if one captures sequential measurements that suffer from per-measurement-independent speckle. We then develop a snapshot SA imaging method and aperture-phase-synchronization strategy that can overcome this limitation and enable SA imaging. Remarkably, we further demonstrate, in simulation, that speckle can be exploited to recover missing spatial frequency information in SA imaging systems with distributed, non-overlapping apertures. That is, one can use speckle to improve the resolution of an SA imaging system.