Toshiaki IWAI and Gaku KIMURA

Research Institute for Electronic Science, Hokkaido University, N12 W6, Sapporo, 060-0812 Japan

(Received June 7, 2000; Accepted June 30, 2000)

A new and simple imaging method for an absorbing object embedded in a dense scattering medium is proposed. The distinct characteristic is the positive usage of the diffusing light in the dense scattering medium to image the absorbing object. The principle is based on the equivalence between a probability distribution function of the path-length and a backscattered intensity distribution integrated spatially in the boundary plane between the medium and the air. The usefulness of the proposed method is experimentally confirmed for a modified pyramidal object painted black and thin tubes filled with black and red inks. The conditions under which the better image can be reconstructed are confirmed from the results of experiments and simulations. It is finally shown that our proposed method is capable of imaging the map of blood vessels distributed under the skin layers.

Key words : diffusing light topography, topographic imaging, probability distribution function of path-length, spatially-integrated backscattering intensity, depth estimation

iwai@es.hokudai.ac.jp