Making the Invisible Visible: Toward High-Quality Terahertz Tomographic Imaging via Physics-Guided Restoration

Terahertz (THz) tomographic imaging has recently attracted significant attention thanks to its non-invasive, non-destructive, non-ionizing, material-classification, and ultra-fast nature for object exploration and inspection. However, its strong water absorption nature and low noise tolerance lead to undesired blurs and distortions of reconstructed THz images. The diffraction-limited THz signals highly constrain the performances of existing restoration methods. To address the problem, we propose a novel multi-view Subspace-Attention-guided Restoration Network (SARNet) that fuses multi-view and multi-spectral features of THz images for effective image restoration and 3D tomographic reconstruction. To this end, SARNet uses multi-scale branches to extract intra-view spatio-spectral amplitude and phase features and fuse them via shared subspace projection and self-attention guidance. We then perform inter-view fusion to further improve the restoration of individual views by leveraging the redundancies between neighboring views. Here, we experimentally construct a THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) system covering a broad frequency range from 0.1 to 4 THz for building up a temporal/spectral/spatial/material THz database of hidden 3D objects. Complementary to a quantitative evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our SARNet model on 3D THz tomographic reconstruction applications.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11263-023-01812-y.