Single photon single pixel imaging into thick scattering medium

Imaging into thick scattering medium is a long-standing challenge. Beyond the quasi-ballistic regime, multiple scattering scrambles the spatiotemporal information of incident/emitted light, making canonical imaging based on light focusing nearly impossible. Diffusion optical tomography (DOT) is one of the most popular approach to look inside scattering medium, but quantitatively inverting the diffusion equation is ill-posed, and prior information of the medium is typically necessary, which is nontrivial to obtain. Here, we show theoretically and experimentally that, by synergizing the one-way light scattering characteristic of single pixel imaging with ultrasensitive single photon detection and a metric-guided image reconstruction, single photon single pixel imaging can serve as a simple and powerful alternative to DOT for imaging into thick scattering medium without prior knowledge or inverting the diffusion equation. We demonstrated an image resolution of 12 mm inside a 60 mm thick (∼ 78 mean free paths) scattering medium.