Coherent synthetic aperture imaging for visible remote sensing via reflective Fourier ptychography.

Synthetic aperture radar can measure the phase of a microwave with an antenna, which cannot be directly extended to visible light imaging due to phase lost. In this Letter, we report an active remote sensing with visible light via reflective Fourier ptychography, termed coherent synthetic aperture imaging (CSAI), achieving high resolution, a wide field-of-view (FOV), and phase recovery. A proof-of-concept experiment is reported with laser scanning and a collimator for the infinite object. Both smooth and rough objects are tested, and the spatial resolution increased from 15.6 to 3.48 µm with a factor of 4.5. The speckle noise can be suppressed obviously, which is important for coherent imaging. Meanwhile, the CSAI method can tackle the aberration induced from the optical system by one-step deconvolution and shows the potential to replace the adaptive optics for aberration removal of atmospheric turbulence.