Polarization-Guided Blind Unmixing for Multi-Target Scattering Imaging Beyond the Optical Memory Effect

Multi-target imaging beyond the optical memory effect (OME) is fundamentally challenged by the incoherent superposition of speckles originating from different OME regions, which renders object separation highly ill-posed. To address this challenge, we introduce a polarization-guided blind unmixing framework that exploits the distinct polarization responses of different targets as an additional discrimination cue for speckle separation. Polarized speckles are first used to construct a dense polarization-response representation through Stokes-based synthesis. The resulting polarization diversity is leveraged to estimate the number of targets without prior knowledge and to identify structurally representative autocorrelation endmembers associated with different objects. An energy-constrained non-negative matrix factorization is then developed to separate individual target autocorrelations, followed by phase retrieval for object reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate the reconstruction of up to five targets located beyond the OME range, achieving target separations of up to 2.6× the measured OME limit and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values above 25 dB, without requiring prior knowledge of target locations, structures, polarization states, or target number.