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

Albert Redo-Sanchez, Barmak Heshmat (), Alireza Aghasi, Salman Naqvi, Mingjie Zhang, Justin Romberg and Ramesh Raskar
Additional contact information
Albert Redo-Sanchez: MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Barmak Heshmat: MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alireza Aghasi: Georgia Institute of Technology
Salman Naqvi: MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mingjie Zhang: MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Justin Romberg: Georgia Institute of Technology
Ramesh Raskar: MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract 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 time-domain 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 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.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12665 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms12665

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12665

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().