A High-Resolution and Low-Cost Entangled Photon Quantum Imaging Framework for Marine Turbulence Environment

Entangled photon quantum imaging technology has become very promising for marine imaging due to its high resolution, anti-turbulence, and anti-interference properties. The turbulence and optical attenuation caused by oceanic water would impose severe limitations on conventional imaging equipment. Quantum imaging based on entangled light sources could make it possible to overcome the constraints of low imaging resolution, large maritime environmental impact and low confidentiality in traditional underwater target imaging. Hence, the recent technological developments in terms of quantum imaging in free space motivate our investigation into high-resolution quantum imaging based on spatially correlated properties of entangled photon pairs in a marine environment. Moreover we propose and design an innovative underwater quantum imaging optical path for experimental verification. We conduct extensive experiments to assess the effectiveness of our proposed quantum imaging approach in marine environments. In order to solve the problem of the slow quantum imaging process, we propose an innovative compressive sensing reconstruction algorithm. Experiments show that the compressive sensing method could be utilized to reduce the imaging time. Finally, we propose an underwater quantum target identification method based on deep learning, further providing the possibility for underwater quantum target identification of entangled light sources.

Introduction

With the continuous development of ocean exploration, the current research on the transmission characteristics of laser in the water environment gives more attention to the absorption and scattering effects. The light transmission will be affected by the random change of the refractive index in the water due to temperature fluctuations caused by the turbulence effect. Therefore, the light wave will generate a wave front distortion which affects the transmission quality of the beam. In some cases, the effect caused by turbulence can even be greater than that of scattering Influence. After the beam propagates through turbulence, it will produce many effects such as light intensity flicker, beam drift and arrival angle fluctuation which will affect the results of quantum imaging. By performing second-order correlation operations on light intensity, quantum imaging has a certain inhibitory effect on turbulence, which also makes quantum imaging a hot spot of imaging research in complex turbulent environments.