Spatial Terahertz-Light Modulators for Single-Pixel Cameras

Terahertz imaging looks set to become an integral part of future applications from semiconductor quality control to medical diagnosis. This will only become a reality when the technology is sufficiently cheap and capabilities adequate to compete with others. Single-pixel cameras use a spatial light modulator and a detector with no spatial-resolution in their imaging process. The spatial-modulator is key as it imparts a series of encoding masks on the beam and the detector measures the dot product of each mask and the object, thereby allowing computers to recover an image via post-processing. They are inherently slower than parallel-pixel imaging arrays although they are more robust and cheaper, hence are highly applicable to the terahertz regime. This chapter dedicates itself to terahertz single-pixel cameras; their current implementations, future directions and how they compare to other terahertz imaging techniques. We start by outlining the competing imaging techniques, then we discuss the theory behind single-pixel imaging; the main section shows the methods of spatially modulating a terahertz beam; and finally there is a discussion about the future limits of such cameras and the concluding remarks express the authors’ vision for the future of single-pixel THz cameras.