A KAIST research team has developed a technology that reconstructs the shape, optical thickness, and position of a transparent object hidden between two dynamic scattering layers from a single shot. The technology could enable precision inspection of transparent semiconductor and display components, as well as biomedical imaging.
KAIST (President Choongsik Bae) announced on August 6 that a research team led by Professor Mooseok Jang from the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering has developed a single-shot phase imaging technique that reconstructs a phase object — a transparent object such as glass, plastic film, or a living cell, which produces almost no visible contrast under an ordinary camera but induces a subtle shift in light called a phase change — from a single measurement, even when the object is fully enclosed between two dynamic scattering layers.
Phase objects are difficult to see with conventional cameras because they show little brightness contrast with their surroundings. However, analyzing the minute phase shift can reveal an object's morphology and optical thickness, and can be used to determine its physical thickness or refractive-index variation when the other quantity is known. For this reason, phase imaging is widely used to observe living cells without staining and to inspect transparent components in semiconductors and displays.
The challenge is that when scattering layers positioned in front of and behind an object are in motion — much like the blurred view through a foggy window — the light path continually changes, making it difficult to obtain accurate information about the object. Conventional techniques have therefore required multiple exposures of the same target, prior calibration of the scattering environment, or training an AI model on large volumes of data.
To address this, the team tightly focused the illumination onto a small spot on the first scattering layer —much like concentrating light to a point with a magnifying glass— so that the light passing through it would carry the object's information as reliably as possible.
The researchers then combined an optical model, which computes how light changes as it passes through the object and scattering layers, with an AI framework. Rather than training on a large set of reference images as conventional AI approaches do, the framework works backward from physical laws to infer the path the light must have taken to produce the measured pattern.
The process is comparable to recovering a clear image from a single blurred photograph taken in fog. Using this approach, the team succeeded in simultaneously determining the shape and thickness of a transparent object, the scattering-induced blur characteristics, and the object's position — all from a single image measuring light intensity.
"This is the first demonstration of restoring the shape and position of a transparent object from a single measurement, even in environments where light is severely scattered, such as behind fog or a diffusive film," said Professor Jang. He added that the team plans to develop the technique further so that it operates reliably in more complex environments, with applications in semiconductor inspection and biomedical imaging.
The study was co-first-authored by Yoosun Kim, a master's student, and Gookho Song, a PhD candidate, both in the KAIST Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, with Professor Jang serving as corresponding author. The paper was published in the international optics journal Optica.
Paper title: "Single-shot imaging of phase objects fully enclosed by dynamic scattering layers"
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.593328
This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea under the Ministry of Science and ICT (RS-2021-NR060086, RS-2023-00251628, RS-2026-25479811), and by a Samsung Electronics industry–academia strategic project (IO260313-15915-01).
