Sandia Labs FY22 Laboratory Directed Research & Development Annual Report

COMPUTATIONAL IMAGING FOR INTELLIGENCE IN HIGHLY SCATTERING AEROSOLS. Aerosols like fog scatter and absorb light, creating degraded visual environments that cause

such as those sponsored by the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, Optical Sensors and Sensing Congress, American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, and the American Association for Aerosol Research. It also allowed for strong collaborations with industry and government partners, including NASA and Teledyne FLIR. (PI: Brian Bentz)

unacceptable downtime for critical systems and operations. Rather than rejecting information in scattered light, this Sandia team sought improved solutions that can interpret the information. A computationally efficient light transport model was developed to achieve computational detection,

Members of Sandia National Laboratories’ fog chamber research team inside the facility after setting up for an experiment. (Photo by Randy Montoya)

localization, and imaging in fog at the Sandia Fog Chamber Facility. Through an academic collaboration with three graduate students and one faculty member at Sandia Alliance partner Purdue University, new sensing methods were developed using speckle intensity correlations that allowed characterization of fog, imaging of hidden objects, and an ability to distinguish objects on a far subwavelength scale. This LDRD project represents significant developments that challenge the limits of imaging through dynamic scattering media and open important application spaces. This project resulted in nine journal articles, three invited and seven contributed talks at high-profile conferences

Left: Sandia’s fog facility creates repeatable and well-characterized fog that is helping Sandia researchers and partners from NASA’s Revolutionary Aviation Mobility group and Teledyne FLIR test sensing capabilities. Right: The Sandia team created two bench-top fog chambers to support collaboration with Alliance partner Purdue University. Sandia is studying and characterizing the fog generated by its new bench-top fog chamber, while Purdue is using its twin system to perform experiments. (Photo by Randy Montoya)

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LABORATORY DIRECTED RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT