I will discuss a robust, coherent interferometric approach for array imaging in cluttered media, in regimes with significant multipathing of the waves by the inhomogeneities in clutter. In such scattering regimes, the recorded traces at the array have long and noisy codas and classic imaging methods give unstable results. Coherent interferometry is essentially a very efficient statistical smoothing technique that exploits systematically the spatial and temporal coherence in the data to obtain stable images.
I will show that in coherent interferometry, there is a delicate balance between having stable and sharp images and achieving the optimal resolution. This balance depends on two clutter dependent decoherence parameters. I will explain briefly how we can estimate these parameters efficiently during the image formation process. The robustness of the proposed imaging method will be illustrated with several results.
This is joint work with L. Borcea and G. Papanicolaou.