Ultrafast imaging with anti-aliasing based on optical time-division multiplexing

Serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) is a novel ultrafast imaging technique that is based on space-to-time-to-wavelength mapping. Nevertheless, the technique requires a high-cost electronic digitizer of several tens of gigahertz sampling rate to read out sufficient image information. To acquire a large amount of image information by using a relatively low-sampling-rate electronic digitizer, an anti-aliasing technique based on optical time-division multiplexing is proposed. A 38.88 MHz line-scan imaging system is demonstrated experimentally. By using the proposed anti-aliasing technique, a 20 GS/s sampling rate is achieved by employing a 10 GS/s electronic digitizer. Defects and scratches on the target that were not identifiable originally can be clearly distinguished after using the proposed technique. Numerical analysis shows that the image quality can be improved by 4.16 dB, compared to that not using the anti-aliasing technique and at least 2.3 dB comparing to those obtained by bilinear, bicubic, and nearest-neighbor interpolation and Lanczos resampling techniques.