Thermal ghost imaging with averaged speckle patterns

Petros Zerom, Zhimin Shi, Malcolm N. O'Sullivan, Kam Wai Clifford Chan, Molly Krogstad, Jeffrey H. Shapiro, and Robert W. Boyd
Phys. Rev. A 86, 063817 – Published 17 December 2012

Abstract

We present theoretical and experimental results showing that a thermal ghost imaging system can produce images of high quality even when it uses detectors so slow that they respond only to intensity-averaged (that is, “blurred”) speckle patterns, as long as the collected signal variation is predominantly caused by the random fluctuation of the incident speckle field rather than other noise sources. In our experimental study, we show that the quality of the ghost image is not degraded when as many as 25 speckle patterns are averaged together for each measurement. This surprising result comes from the fact that the averaging of speckle patterns leads to a decrease in the contrast but not in the kurtosis, and the image quality of a ghost imaging system is dependent on the kurtosis rather than the contrast ratio of the illuminating field. These results suggest that a broad class of imaging systems based on the use of speckle techniques can be implemented even using detectors that respond slowly on the time scale of the fluctuating speckle pattern.

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  • Received 15 June 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.86.063817

©2012 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Petros Zerom1,*, Zhimin Shi1,*,†, Malcolm N. O'Sullivan1, Kam Wai Clifford Chan2, Molly Krogstad1,3, Jeffrey H. Shapiro4, and Robert W. Boyd1,5

  • 1The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA
  • 2Rochester Optical Manufacturing Company, 1260 Lyell Avenue, Rochester, New York 14606, USA
  • 3Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
  • 4Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
  • 5Department of Physics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5

  • *P. Zerom and Z. Shi contributed equally to this work.
  • zshi@optics.rochester.edu

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Vol. 86, Iss. 6 — December 2012

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