Abstract
Direct imaging is a convenient way to obtain information on the interior of a semi-transparent turbid material by non-invasive probing using laser beams. The major difficulty is linked to scattering which scrambles the directional information coming from the laser beam. It is found in this paper that the long-term multiple-scattered reflected photons may provide structural information on the inside of a material, which offers an interesting alternative to using information only from un-scattered or least-scattered photons as obtained from current direct imaging set-ups for thin media.
Based on some observations on a non-homogeneous three layered 1-D slab irradiated by a laser pulse, a direct probing methodology making use of the long-term back-scattered photons is illustrated to recover inclusions positions in a turbid 2-D medium. First, the numerical model is presented. Second, an extended parametrical study is conducted on 1-D homogeneous and non-homogeneous slabs with different laser pulse durations. It is found that the reflected asymptotic logarithmic slope carries information about the presence of the inclusion and that short laser pulses are not necessary since only the decaying parts of the remanent optical signature is important. Longer laser pulses allow a higher level of energy injection and signal to noise ratio. Third, those observations are used for the probing of a 2-D non-homogeneous phantom.