High speed terahertz pulse imaging in the reflection geometry and image quality enhancement by digital image processing

We describe the formation and enhancement of two dimensional pulsed terahertz (THz) images obtained in the reflection geometry with a high-speed optical delay line. Two test objects are imaged and analyzed with respect to material information and concealed structure. Clear THz images were obtained with various imaging modes and were compared with the X-ray images. The THz image of a sample revealed material features that the X-ray image cannot distinguish. We could enhance the THz image quality using various image processing techniques, such as edge detection, de-noising, high-pass filtering, and wavelet filtering.