Image transmission through an opaque material

OCIS codes: Optical imaging relies on the ability to illuminate an object, collect and analyze the light it scatters or transmits. Propagation through complex media such as biological tissues was so far believed to degrade the attainable depth as well as the resolution for imaging because of multiple scattering. This is why such media are usually considered opaque. Very recently, we have proven that it is possible to measure the complex mesoscopic optical transmission channels that allows light to traverse through such an opaque medium. Here we show that we can optimally exploit those channels to coherently transmit and recover with a high fidelity an arbitrary image, independently of the complexity of the propagation. In a classical optical system, the propagation of a complex field from one plane to another is well understood, be it by Fresnel or Fraunhofer diffraction theory, or ray-tracing for more complex cases [1]. However, all these approaches break down when multiple scattering occurs [2]. A medium where light is scattered many times mixes in a seemingly random way all input k-vectors, and is usually considered opaque. Until recently, scattering has always been considered as noise [3] and most imaging techniques in turbid media rely on ballistic photons only [4, 5] which prevents the study of thick scattering samples. Following works in acoustics [6], recent experiments have demonstrated that multipl