High-fidelity multi-channel optical information transmission through scattering media

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 32; no. 2; pp. 2846 - 2855
• Main Authors: Shao, Rongjun, Ding, Chunxu, Liu, Linxian, He, Qiaozhi, Qu, Yuan, Yang, Jiamiao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 15.01.2024
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.514668

High-fidelity optical information transmission through strongly scattering media is challenging, but is crucial for the applications such as the free-space optical communication in a haze or fog. Binarizing optical information can somehow suppress the disruptions caused by light scattering. However, this method gives a compromised communication throughput. Here, we propose high-fidelity multiplexing anti-scattering transmission (MAST). MAST encodes multiple bits into a complex-valued pattern, loads the complex-valued pattern to an optical field through modulation, and finally employs a scattering matrix-assisted retrieval technique to reconstruct the original information from the speckle patterns. In our demonstration, we multiplexed three channels and MAST achieved a high-fidelity transmission of 3072 (= 1024× 3) bits data per transmission and average transmission error as small as 0.06%.