Prior-free non-invasive imaging through biological layers exceeding memory effect with low data volume

Optical imaging through scattering media, particularly inhomogeneous or anisotropic media, poses a substantial and complex challenge. Numerous methods have been presented to mitigate scattering effect and retrieve the objects. However, these techniques suffer from limitations in terms of reconstruction quality and field of view, require a substantial amount of data, or are only effective for scenarios involving weak scattering. To address these limitations, we propose a novel encoding-decoding scheme capable to restore image of the target beyond the memory effect range (MER). Experimentally, we proved that our technique is possible to exploit cropped speckles, resulting from sparse illuminated object points, to recover sparse or continuous targets through a 200um mouse slice. Additionally, we have demonstrated that our approach can achieve a large field of view exceeding 3 MER using only a small sample data with 120 speckle images. Importantly, our proposed approach neither relies upon ballistic light nor uses the knowledge of the illumination patterns, and it is robust to anisotropic biological media without any prior. Our demonstration presents a promising approach for optical imaging through highly scattering media, such as biological brain tissue, with a large field of view.