Abstract

Light entering highly diffusing material is scattered severely in all directions. However, the component that has scattered the least will best form a shadow image of any absorbing objects encountered in the medium. In the case of a short pulse of light entering the diffusing medium, the emerging pulse can be many orders of magnitude longer than the incident pulse, because of multiple scattering. The light at the beginning of this long pulse (the first arriving light) is the least scattered component and must be temporally isolated from the remainder of the pulse in order to use it for imaging. This is accomplished through the use of a very fast gate.

© 1996 Optical Society of America