We present an experimental demonstration of ghost imaging of reflective objects with different surface roughness. The influence of the surface roughness, the transverse size of the test detector, and the reflective angle on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is analyzed by measuring the second-order correlation of the light field based on classical statistical optics. It is shown that the SNR decreases with an increment of the surface roughness and the detector’s transverse size or a decrease of the reflective angle. Additionally, the comparative studies between the rough object and the smooth one under the same conditions are also discussed.

In this review, the principle and the optical methods for light-field display are introduced. The light-field display is divided into three categories, including the layer-based method, projector-based method, and integral imaging method. The principle, characteristic, history, and advanced research results of each method are also reviewed. The advantages of light-field display are discussed by comparing it with other display technologies including binocular stereoscopic display, volumetric three-dimensional display, and holographic display.

Depth from focus (DFF) is a technique for estimating the depth and three-dimensional (3D) shape of an object from a multi-focus image sequence. At present, focus evaluation algorithms based on DFF technology will always cause inaccuracies in deep map recovery from image focus. There are two main reasons behind this issue. The first is that the window size of the focus evaluation operator has been fixed. Therefore, for some pixels, enough neighbor information cannot be covered in a fixed window and is easily disturbed by noise, which results in distortion of the model. For other pixels, the fixed window is too large, which increases the computational burden. The second is the level of difficulty to get the full focus pixels, even though the focus evaluation calculation in the actual calculation process has been completed. In order to overcome these problems, an adaptive window iteration algorithm is proposed to enhance image focus for accurate depth estimation. This algorithm will automatically adjust the window size based on gray differences in a window that aims to solve the fixed window problem. Besides that, it will also iterate evaluation values to enhance the focus evaluation of each pixel. Comparative analysis of the evaluation indicators and model quality has shown the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive window iteration algorithm.

We proposed a three-dimensional (3D) image authentication method using binarized phase images in double random phase integral imaging (InI). Two-dimensional (2D) element images obtained from InI are encoded using a double random phase encryption (DRPE) algorithm. Only part of the phase information is used in the proposed method rather than using all of the amplitude and phase information, which can make the final data sparse and beneficial to data compression, storage, and transmission. Experimental results verified the method and successfully proved the developed 3D authentication process using a nonlinear cross correlation method.

Vascular Doppler optical coherence tomography (DOCT) images with weak boundaries are usually difficult for most algorithms to segment. We propose a modified random walk (MRW) algorithm with a novel regularization for the segmentation of DOCT vessel images. Based on MRW, we perform automatic boundary detection of the vascular wall from intensity images and boundary extraction of the blood flowing region from Doppler phase images. Dice, sensitivity, and specificity coefficients were adopted to verify the segmentation performance. The experimental study on DOCT images of the mouse femoral artery showed the effectiveness of our proposed method, yielding three-dimensional visualization and quantitative evaluation of the vessel.

By improving the long-term correlation tracking (LCT) algorithm, an effective object tracking method, improved LCT (ILCT), is proposed to address the issue of occlusion. If the object is judged being occluded by the designed criterion, which is based on the characteristic of response value curve, an added re-detector will perform re-detection, and the tracker is ordered to stop. Besides, a filtering and adoption strategy of re-detection results is given to choose the most reliable one for the re-initialization of the tracker. Extensive experiments are carried out under the conditions of occlusion, and the results demonstrate that ILCT outperforms some state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness.

Laser-driven ultrafast X-ray sources are widely used for diagnostic radiography. However, there is a large divergence of fast electrons when they are generated by an intense short-pulse laser interacting with a foil target. We design a nanowire array target to achieve a more compact point X-ray source. Fast electrons are confined and guided by the nanowire array structure in order to generate a Kα source with a small spot size. In our work, the smallest measured source size is comparable to the laser spot size, while the conversion efficiency can reach 2.4×10 4.

A transfer method is introduced to derive the normalized radiance for CE318 Sun/sky radiometer using viewing solid angles and extraterrestrial calibration constants. The new transfer method has a good consistency at different parts of the sky scanning. Error analysis suggests that the uncertainty of the transferred method is about 2.0%–2.4%. The normalized radiances are used as input of the aerosol inversion to test the performance of the new transfer method. The residuals of the inversion (e.g., difference between fitted and measured radiance) are chosen as the index of the radiance calibration accuracy. Analyses of one year’s measurements in Beijing suggest an average sky residual of 3.3% for almucantar scanning (while 3.7% for the AERONET method), which suggest a better accuracy of the transfer method when used in aerosol retrieval.

The average bit-error rate (ABER) performance of free-space optical (FSO) communication links is investigated for space-shift keying (SSK) over log-normal and negative-exponential atmospheric turbulence channels. SSK is compared with repetition codes and a single-input single-output system using multiple pulse amplitude modulations. Simulation results show that the signal-to-noise ratio gain of SSK largely increases with greater spectral efficiencies and/or higher turbulence effects. A tight bound for ABER is derived based on an exact moment generation function (MGF) for negative-exponential channel and an approximate MGF for log-normal channel. Finally, extensive Monte Carlo simulations are run to validate the analytical analysis.

The energy of light exposed on human skin is compulsively limited for safety reasons which affects the power of photoacoustic (PA) signal and its signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) level. Thus, the final reconstructed PA image quality is degraded. This Letter proposes an adaptive multi-sample-based approach to enhance the SNR of PA signals and in addition, detailed information in rebuilt PA images that used to be buried in the noise can be distinguished. Both ex vivo and in vivo experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method which provides its potential value in clinical trials.