Terahertz time-gated spectral imaging for content extraction through layered structures

Albert Redo-Sanchez, Barmak Heshmat, Alireza Aghasi, Salman Naqvi, Mingjie Zhang, Justin Romberg, Ramesh Raskar
2016 Nature Communications  
Spatial resolution, spectral contrast and occlusion are three major bottlenecks for non-invasive inspection of complex samples with current imaging technologies. We exploit the sub-picosecond time resolution along with spectral resolution provided by terahertz timedomain spectroscopy to computationally extract occluding content from layers whose thicknesses are wavelength comparable. The method uses the statistics of the reflected terahertz electric field at subwavelength gaps to lock into each
more » ... layer position and then uses a time-gated spectral kurtosis to tune to highest spectral contrast of the content on that specific layer. To demonstrate, occluding textual content was successfully extracted from a packed stack of paper pages down to nine pages without human supervision. The method provides over an order of magnitude enhancement in the signal contrast and can impact inspection of structural defects in wooden objects, plastic components, composites, drugs and especially cultural artefacts with subwavelength or wavelength comparable layers.
doi:10.1038/ncomms12665 pmid:27610926 pmcid:PMC5023963 fatcat:f4wxoiljjvgjvkiwvpiuwuch6a