Pilot-assisted beam and correlation to recover information through scattering media [Invited].

Propagation of light through a random scattering media is a challenging, yet a highly practical problem in numerous fields, such as in astronomy, medical diagnosis, non-line-of-sight imaging, imaging through fog, etc. Scattering media distort the light and generate a random pattern without any directly useful information. Nevertheless, the randomness of the light plays a significant role in designing and developing correlation-based imaging and measurement techniques. Correlation optics exploits the intrinsic fundamental features of randomness to unveil hidden information within the scattered light. This mini-review highlights the role of polarization correlation and pilot-assisted beam guiding through scattering medium in information recovery through random scattering media. Here, one of the orthogonal polarization components of the light is loaded with the information and the other is without the information, and this special scheme of the colinear beam propagation through the random scattering medium is referred to as the pilot-assisted beam guiding. Such a pilot-assisted propagation strategy helps to counter the randomness and preserves the desired information through the scattering channel. In this article, we mainly focus on the recent progress and advancement in polarization correlation with pilot-assisted beam guiding in looking through random scattering media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]