Future Exoplanet Research: High-Contrast Imaging Techniques

High-contrast imaging (HCI) techniques appear like the best solutions to directly characterize large orbit planets and planetary environments in the future. Ten years after the installation of the first dedicated scientific instruments on VLT (SPHERE) and Gemini South (GPI), technology has evolved and methodologies have been refined to enable us to offer new, highly ambitious instruments. HCI is a mature but prolific area of research, with many technical solutions being proposed to improve current instrument concepts. Most of these new techniques have not yet been tested at the expected level of performance and/or in real conditions. Thus, it is rather difficult to define precisely which solutions will be the most efficient scientifically with respect to the future technical, environmental, and operational constraints. Among these different solutions, I will describe and discuss the main directions of development necessary for enhancing future HCI instruments, focusing on speckle suppression, wavefront correction, and detection methods.