What is needed to make this work is a camera sensor that rather than recording the total amount of light received at each pixel instead records the maximum amplitude of the light received at each pixel.
Laser Imaging Video Camera Sees through Fire, Fog, Smoke:
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2015/ps_5.html
The device works by sending out fast pulses of near-infrared laser light and then opening the aperture, or gate, just in time to catch them after they’ve reflected off the target object, Billmers explains.
Light travels at one foot per nanosecond, so the camera might send out a 10-nanosecond pulse of light and then wait about 50 nanoseconds to open the gate. In the interval, the light has passed through the obscurant, which reflects and dissipates some of it, then bounced off of whatever happens to be around 25 feet away, and returned to the camera.