Single-photon detection (SPD) technologies have been applied to detect extremely weak light signals under extreme environments. However, external photon noise, resulting from the natural light, hinders their further applications due to the extreme sensitivity of SPD and weakly received optical signal. Here, we want to introduce two proposals to overcome this limitation. Firstly, we introduce a new passive single-photon dynamic imaging method using its frequency information. This method utilizes the inherent randomness of photon radiation and detection to construct a compressive imaging system. It captures the broadband dynamic features of the point object through sparse photon detection and shows excellent noise resistance, achieving high-quality imaging with a signal-to-background ratio of 1/332. Secondly, we perform noise-resistance underwater correlated biphoton imaging (CPI) through a home-built super-bunching laser. Compared with a coherent laser, the probabilities of generated bundle N-photons of the super-bunching laser have been enhanced by at least several order of magnitude, enabling CPI under weak light intensity. We experimentally demonstrated CPI with reasonable imaging contrast under the noise-to-signal ratio (NSR) up to 105, and the noise-resistance performance has been improved by at least two orders of magnitude compared to the single-photon imaging technology. These results break the limits of underwater imaging through classical coherent lasers and may offer many enhanced imaging applications, such as long-range target tracking and deep-sea optical exploration under noisy environments.

Chengbing Qin is a professor and doctoral advisor at State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics Technologies and Devices, vice director of Institute of Laser Spectroscopy, Shanxi University. He has supported by the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scientists. He has developed single-molecule quantum coherence spectrometer with independent intellectual property rights have been used in the areas of military aircraft early warning and air pollution monitoring. In the recent five years, he has also published 50 SCI-cited papers written as the first or corresponding author, including 14 papers published on JCR first zone journals.