Tuning Axial Resolution Independent of Lateral Resolution in a Computational Imaging System Using Bessel Speckles

Speckle patterns are formed by random interferences of mutually coherent beams. While speckles are often considered as unwanted noise in many areas, they also formed the foundation for the development of numerous speckle-based imaging, holography, and sensing technologies. In the recent years, artificial speckle patterns have been generated with spatially incoherent sources using static and dynamic optical modulators for advanced imaging applications. In this report, a basic study has been carried out with Bessel distribution as the fundamental building block of the speckle pattern (i.e., speckle patterns formed by randomly interfering Bessel beams). In general, Bessel beams have a long focal depth, which in this scenario is counteracted by the increase in randomness enabling tunability of the axial resolution. As a direct imaging method could not be applied when there is more than one Bessel beam, an indirect computational imaging framework has been applied to study the imaging characteristics. This computational imaging process consists of three steps. In the first step, the point spread function (PSF) is calculated, which is the speckle pattern formed by the random interferences of Bessel beams. In the next step, the intensity distribution for an object is obtained by a convolution between the PSF and object function. The object information is reconstructed by processing the PSF and the object intensity distribution using non-linear reconstruction. In the computational imaging framework, the lateral resolution remained a constant, while the axial resolution improved when the randomness in the system was increased. Three-dimensional computational imaging with statistical averaging for different cases of randomness has been synthetically demonstrated for two test objects located at two different distances. The presented study will lead to a new generation of incoherent imaging technologies.