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

Abstract

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%.