Experimental study of a DMD based compressive line sensing imaging system in the turbulence environment

The Compressive Line Sensing (CLS) active imaging system has been demonstrated to be effective in scattering mediums, such as coastal turbid water, fog and mist, through simulations and test tank experiments. The CLS prototype hardware consists of a CW laser, a DMD, a photomultiplier tube, and a data acquisition instrument. CLS employs whiskbroom imaging formation that is compatible with traditional survey platforms. The sensing model adopts the distributed compressive sensing theoretical framework that exploits both intra-signal sparsity and highly correlated nature of adjacent areas in a natural scene. During sensing operation, the laser illuminates the spatial light modulator DMD to generate a series of 1D binary sensing pattern from a codebook to “encode” current target line segment. A single element detector PMT acquires target reflections as encoder output. The target can then be recovered using the encoder output and a predicted on-target codebook that reflects the environmental interference of original codebook entries. In this work, we investigated the effectiveness of the CLS imaging system in a turbulence environment. Turbulence poses challenges in many atmospheric and underwater surveillance applications. A series of experiments were conducted in the Naval Research Lab’s optical turbulence test facility with the imaging path subjected to various turbulence intensities. The total-variation minimization sparsifying basis was used in imaging reconstruction. The preliminary experimental results showed that the current imaging system was able to recover target information under various turbulence strengths. The challenges of acquiring data through strong turbulence environment and future enhancements of the system will be discussed.