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Ultrasonically-sculpted gradient-index optical waveguides enable non-invasive light confinement inside scattering media. The confinement level strongly depends on ultrasound parameters (e.g., amplitude, frequency), and medium optical properties (e.g., extinction coefficient). We develop a physically-accurate simulator, and use it to quantify these dependencies for a radially-symmetric virtual optical waveguide. Our analysis provides insights for optimizing virtual optical waveguides for given applications. We leverage these insights to configure virtual optical waveguides that improve light confinement fourfold compared to previous configurations at five mean free paths. We show that virtual optical waveguides enhance light throughput by 50% compared to an ideal external lens, in a medium with bladder-like optical properties at one transport mean free path. We corroborate these simulation findings with real experiments: we demonstrate, for the first time, that virtual optical waveguides recycle scattered light, and enhance light throughput by 15% compared to an external lens at five transport mean free paths.

We demonstrate in situ non-invasive relay imaging through a medium without inserting physical optical components. We show that a virtual optical graded-index (GRIN) lens can be sculpted in the medium using in situ reconfigurable ultrasonic interference patterns to relay images through the medium. Ultrasonic wave patterns change the local density of the medium to sculpt a graded refractive index pattern normal to the direction of light propagation, which modulates the phase front of light, causing it to focus within the medium and effectively creating a virtual relay lens. We demonstrate the in situ relay imaging and resolving of small features (22 µm) through a turbid medium (optical thickness = 5.7 times the scattering mean free path), which is normally opaque. The focal distance and the numerical aperture of the sculpted optical GRIN lens can be tuned by changing the ultrasonic wave parameters. As an example, we experimentally demonstrate that the axial focal distance can be continuously scanned over a depth of 5.4 mm in the modulated medium and that the numerical aperture can be tuned up to 21.5%. The interaction of ultrasonic waves and light can be mediated through different physical media, including turbid media, such as biological tissue, in which the ultrasonically sculpted GRIN lens can be used for relaying images of the underlying structures through the turbid medium, thus providing a potential alternative to implanting invasive endoscopes.

We introduce Doppler time-of-flight (D-ToF) rendering, an extension of ToF rendering for dynamic scenes, with applications in simulating D-ToF cameras. D-ToF cameras use high-frequency modulation of illumination and exposure, and measure the Doppler frequency shift to compute the radial velocity of dynamic objects. The time-varying scene geometry and high-frequency modulation functions used in such cameras make it challenging to accurately and efficiently simulate their measurements with existing ToF rendering algorithms. We overcome these challenges in a twofold manner: To achieve accuracy, we derive path integral expressions for D-ToF measurements under global illumination and form unbiased Monte Carlo estimates of these integrals. To achieve efficiency, we develop a tailored time-path sampling technique that combines antithetic time sampling with correlated path sampling. We show experimentally that our sampling technique achieves up to two orders of magnitude lower variance compared to naive time-path sampling. We provide an open-source simulator that serves as a digital twin for D-ToF imaging systems, allowing imaging researchers, for the first time, to investigate the impact of modulation functions, material properties, and global illumination on D-ToF imaging performance.

One of the open challenges in lensless imaging is understanding how well they resolve scenes in three dimensions. The measurement model underlying prior lensless imagers lacks special structures that facilitate deeper analysis; thus, a theoretical study of the achievable spatio-axial resolution has been lacking. This paper provides such a theoretical framework by analyzing a generalization of a mask-based lensless camera, where the sensor captures z-stacked measurements acquired by moving the sensor relative to an attenuating mask. We show that the z-stacked measurements are related to the scene’s volumetric albedo function via a three-dimensional convolutional operator. The specifics of this convolution, and its Fourier transform, allow us to fully characterize the spatial and axial resolving power of the camera, including its dependence on the mask. Since z-stacked measurements are a superset of those made by previously-studied lensless systems, these results provide an upper bound for their performance. We numerically evaluate the theory and its implications using simulations.

We exploit memory effect correlations in speckles for the imaging of incoherent fluorescent sources behind scattering tissue. These correlations are often weak when imaging thick scattering tissues and complex illumination patterns, both of which greatly limit the practicality of associated techniques. In this work, we introduce a spatial light modulator between the tissue sample and the imaging sensor and capture multiple modulations of the speckle pattern. We show that by correctly designing the modulation patterns and the associated reconstruction algorithm, statistical correlations in the measurements can be greatly enhanced. We exploit this to demonstrate the reconstruction of mega-pixel sized fluorescent patterns behind the scattering tissue.