High-visibility ghost imaging from artificially generated non-Gaussian intensity fluctuations

Abstract

The image quality in ghost imaging is vital in practical applications. Through theoretical analysis, we find that for thermal light the average intensity as well as the fluctuations of an arbitrary incident field can greatly influence the image quality. Based on this, we suggest an easily realizable scheme to improve the visibility by generating speckles of non-Gaussian intensity distributions with a spatial light modulator. Numerical simulation demonstrates that this method can significantly improve the visibility, and the effect on the imaging resolution is also discussed. This method may thus be helpful in promoting the implementation of ghost imaging in real applications

Supplementary document for Computational Plenoptic Ghost Diffraction - 6292774.pdf

“…As we can see, CH-GD has significantly better image quality both visually and quantitatively, and CH-GD with a small number of realizations already has better image quality than GD with a large number of realizations. Also, the theoretical upper limit of visibility in GD is only 1/3 [12,13] due to the nature of the intensity correlation of thermal light. To overcome this inherent disadvantage, people often use optimization algorithms such as compressed sensing or non-Gaussian well-designed illumination patterns (such as orthogonal illumination basis) to break through the visibility limit.…”

Nth-order nonlinear intensity fluctuation amplifier

“…The role of light intensity fluctuations in improving the resolution of optical image has been proved [4,5,6,7]. The impact of light intensity fluctuations on the visibility of ghost imaging, ghost interference, and ghost diffraction were reported in [8,9,10,11,12]. The beam positioning was performed by the fluctuation of an actual beam oscillation [13].…”

High visibility temporal ghost imaging with classical light

“…Different methods, such as differential ghost imaging [20], normalized ghost imaging [21], correspondence ghost imaging [22,23], high-order ghost imaging [24][25][26], etc, have been employed to improve the visibility of ghost imaging with classical light. However, mathematical algorithms, which require extra calculations, are employed in these methods to improve the visibility [20][21][22][23][24][25].…”