  Error-control-coding (ECC) techniques are widely used in modern digital
communication systems to minimize the effect of noisy channels on the quality
of received signals. Motivated by the fact that both communication and imaging
can be considered as an information transfer process, in this paper we
demonstrate that ECC could yield significant improvements in the image quality
by reducing the effect of noise in the physical process of image acquisition.
In the demonstrated approach, the object is encoded by ECC structured light
fields generated by a digital-micromirror-device (DMD) while its image is
obtained by decoding the received signal collected by a bucket-detector (BD).
By applying a Luby Transform (LT) code as an example, our proof-of-concept
experiment validates that the object image can be effectively reconstructed
while errors induced by noisy reception can be significantly reduced. The
demonstrated approach informs a new imaging technique: ECC assisted imaging,
which can be scaled into applications such as remote sensing, spectroscopy and
biomedical imaging.
