Many imaging applications require increasingly bright illumination sources,
motivating the replacement of conventional thermal light sources with light
emitting diodes (LEDs), superluminescent diodes (SLDs) and lasers. Despite
their brightness, lasers and SLDs are poorly suited for full-field imaging
applications because their high spatial coherence leads to coherent artifacts
known as speckle that corrupt image formation. We recently demonstrated that
random lasers can be engineered to provide low spatial coherence. Here, we
exploit the low spatial coherence of specifically-designed random lasers to
perform speckle-free full-field imaging in the setting of significant optical
scattering. We quantitatively demonstrate that images generated with random
laser illumination exhibit higher resolution than images generated with
spatially coherent illumination. By providing intense laser illumination
without the drawback of coherent artifacts, random lasers are well suited for a
host of full-field imaging applications from full-field microscopy to digital
light projector systems.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure