Quantum-inspired computational wavefront shaping enables turbulence-resilient distributed aperture synthesis imaging.

Abstract

Wavefront shaping is essential for optical imaging through aberrations, but conventional methods rely on physical modulators and iterative optimization, hindering real-time applications in dynamic environments like turbulence. Inspired by quantum nonlocal aberration cancellation, we propose a modulator-free, computational wavefront shaping technique. By leveraging classical correlated illumination and single-pixel detection, our method corrects aberrations via virtual phase modulation in the computational domain, eliminating physical spatial light modulators or array sensors. As validation, we demonstrate this approach in a distributed optical aperture synthesis imaging, where a phase-randomized laser array illuminates objects through turbulence. Despite unknown subsource phase mismatch and turbulent distortion, we reconstruct diffraction-limited images of a 3-meter standoff object, at the theoretical resolution limit of the synthetic aperture (0.157 millimeter experimentally; 97% of the 0.152-millimeter limit). This work transforms traditionally intractable hardware challenges into computationally solvable problems, enabling turbulence-resilient standoff imaging without adaptive optics.