Scanning‐Driven Photon‐Counting 3D Imaging through Scattering Media Via Asynchronous Polarization Modulation

Abstract Imaging through scattering media is widely studied in various applications including industrial inspection and autonomous driving. Most existing image sensors always suffer from the aliasing effect that generates a diffused image, leading to an extremely challenging problem in recovering targets of high quality, especially for 3D imaging. In this study, a scanning‐driven photon‐counting 3D imaging system through scattering media is proposed via asynchronous polarization modulation. To eliminate the aliasing effect, we utilize a point‐to‐point scanning strategy is used to illuminate the target and a photon‐counting detector to perceive weak echo signals passing through scattering media. Then, an asynchronous polarization‐modulated ranging method is proposed innovatively based on the Gamma pulse model to calculate the relative depth of the target for 3D imaging with the consideration of scattering media's difference. Therefore, the accuracy of the calculated depth and the generalization capability of the proposed method in real applications can be significantly improved. In addition, a time reshaping method is proposed to cope with the depth ambiguity caused by asynchronous measurements. In the experiment, a variety of strong scattering media is used to verify the excellent imaging capability of the proposed method.