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Featured Application: Non-destructive inspection of plastic and ceramic products. Terahertz (THz) technology offers unique see-through imaging capability for various non-destructive inspection applications. In this work, we implemented a broadband continuous-wave THz imaging system to study technical issues related to the see-through imaging, including frequency-dependent resolution, material loss, and interference-induced artifacts. The interference-induced false contrast and artifacts were observed, which were suppressed by broadband imaging techniques adopting the homodyne signal amplification by interferometric setup to overcome the material loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resolution and accuracy of terahertz (THz) imaging depend on the scanning distance between raster pixels. Recently, numerous studies have focused on increasing scanning speed and accuracy. The current study presented a high-speed scanning method without dwell time during scanning. A compensation factor for the velocity in a motorized x-y linear stage with a scanning sample was introduced to maintain the high accuracy of image scanning with the proposed method. The THz imaging system consisted of fiber-coupled pulsed photoconductive antenna and motorized x-y linear stage based on THz-time-domain spectroscopy. A validation specimen was fabricated by using copper tape and acrylic plate to compare the image scanning performance of various methods. Reflection mode scanning with 90° incident angles was conducted on the validation sample. The performance of the proposed scanning method without dwell time was evaluated and compared with that of other methods in terms of scanning speed, which is defined as the number of pixels per second; and geometric matching ratio, which uses modal assurance criterion (MAC) to quantify scanning accuracy. Results confirmed that the scanning speed of the proposed method is 328 % faster than that of conventional scanning methods and that the MAC value of the geometric matching ratio is more than 0.994 without any additional equipment installation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terahertz (THz) technology offers unique see-through imaging capability for various non-destructive inspection applications. In this work, we implemented a broadband continuous-wave THz imaging system to study technical issues related to the see-through imaging, including frequency-dependent resolution, material loss, and interference-induced artifacts. The interference-induced false contrast and artifacts were observed, which were suppressed by broadband imaging techniques adopting the homodyne signal amplification by interferometric setup to overcome the material loss.