Scalable non-invasive imaging through dynamic scattering media at low photon flux

Abstract When the intensity of light reduces to single-photon level, the shot noise becomes dominant. Random scatter, especially the time-varying media will highly increase the photon-limited imaging challenge that the traditional imaging means are inadequate to cope with. In this paper, we develop a new scalable “one to all” imaging approach which focuses on dynamic scattering imaging under photon-limited condition. When the dynamic media optical density is five, we apply this principle to inverse scattering problem and retrieve high-quality images in a real-time way using as little as ∼ 0.4 valid detected photons per pixel on average successfully. The effects of lighting intensities and perturbations are analyzed to highlight special significance of the work. The ultimate results demonstrate that one trained strategy is robust to a wide range of statistical variations in dynamic media, which outperforms common “one to one” method and improves the practical utility efficaciously. This non-invasive imaging work promises a wide prospect in photon-limited scattering applications such as in vivo bioimaging and so on.