Mitigating the effects of granular scattering using cepstrum analysis in terahertz time-domain spectral imaging

Terahertz (THz) imaging is a widely used technique in the study and detection of many chemicals and biomolecules in polycrystalline form because the spectral absorption signatures of these target materials often lie in the THz frequencies. When the size of dielectric grain boundaries are comparable to the THz wavelengths, spectral features can be obscured due to electromagnetic scattering. In this study, we first investigate this granular scattering effect in identification of chemicals with THz spectral absorption features. We then will propose a signal processing technique in the so-called “quefrency” domain to improve the ability to resolve these spectral features in the diffuse scattered THz images. We created a pellet with α-lactose monohydrate and riboflavin, two biologically significant materials with well-known vibrational spectral resonances, and buried the pellet in a highly scattering medium. THz transmission measurements were taken at all angles covering the half focal plane. We show that, while spectral features of lactose and riboflavin cannot be distinguished in the scattered image, application of cepstrum filtering can mitigate these scattering effects. By employing our quefrency-domain signal processing technique, we were able to unambiguously detect the dielectric resonance of lactose in the diffused scattering geometries. Finally we will discuss the limitation of the new proposed technique in spectral identification of chemicals.