Determining the spatial phase distribution of light scattered by turbid water

The performance of lidar systems used for high resolution ranging and imaging in coastal water environments is primarily limited by optical scattering. Understanding how scattering effects the optical phasefront of laser light has the potential to improve the performance of these systems. In this paper, light is transmitted through a scattering underwater environment, and the transmitted light is then encoded with optical phase. This encoding allows us to understand the optical phase distribution of the transmitted light. Specifically, we demonstrate through a combination of theory, simulation, and experiment that we can determine the statistics of the optical phase distribution of light by measuring the spatial intensity distribution of the encoded optical return. These results advance our understanding of the relationship between optical phase and scattering, as well as inform the performance enhancements and limitations associated with this spatial discrimination, optical signal processing approach.