Compared with two-dimensional imaging, three-dimensional imaging is much more advantageous to catch the characteristic information of the target for remote sensing. We report a range-resolving ghost imaging ladar system together with the experimental
demonstration of three-dimensional remote sensing with a large field of view. The experiments show that, by measuring the correlation function of intensity fluctuations between two light fields, a three-dimensional map at about 1.0 km range with 25 cm resolution in lateral direction and 60 cm resolution in axial direction has been achieved by time-resolved measurements of the reflection signals.
For conventional imaging, the imaging resolution limit is given by the Rayleigh criterion. Exploiting the prior knowledge of imaging objects sparsity and fixed optical system, imaging beyond the conventional Rayleigh limit, which is backed up by nume
rical simulation and experiments, is achieved by illuminating the object with single-shot thermal light and detecting the objects information at the imaging plane with some sparse-array single-pixel detectors. The quality of sub-Rayleigh imaging with sparse detection is also shown to be related to the effective number of single-pixel detectors and the detection signal-to-noise ratio at the imaging plane.
For conventional imaging, shaking of the imaging system or the target leads to the degradation of imaging resolution. In this work, the influence of the targets shaking to fourier-transform ghost diffraction (FGD) is investigated. The analytical resu
lts, which are backed up by numerical simulation and experiments, demonstrate that the quiver of target has no effect on the resolution of FGD, thus the targets imaging with high spatial resolution can be always achieved by phase-retrieval method from the FGD patterns. This approach can be applied in high-precision imaging systems, to overcome the influence of the systems shaking to imaging resolution.
For remote sensing, high-resolution imaging techniques are helpful to catch more characteristic information of the target. We extend pseudo-thermal light ghost imaging to the area of remote imaging and propose a ghost imaging lidar system. For the fi
rst time, we demonstrate experimentally that the real-space image of a target at about 1.0 km range with 20 mm resolution is achieved by ghost imaging via sparsity constraints (GISC) technique. The characters of GISC technique compared to the existing lidar systems are also discussed.
Correlated imaging through atmospheric turbulence is studied, and the analytical expressions describing turbulence effects on image resolution are derived. Compared with direct imaging, correlated imaging can reduce the influence of turbulence to a c
ertain extent and reconstruct high-resolution images. The result is backed up by numerical simulations, in which turbulence-induced phase perturbations are simulated by random phase screens inserting propagation paths.
Based on compressive sampling techniques and short exposure imaging, super-resolution imaging with thermal light is experimentally demonstrated exploiting the sparse prior property of images for standard conventional imaging system. Differences betwe
en super-resolution imaging demonstrated in this letter and super-resolution ghost imaging via compressive sampling (arXiv. Quant-ph/0911.4750v1 (2009)), and methods to further improve the imaging quality are also discussed.
Both ghost imaging (GI) and ghost imaging via compressive sampling (GICS) can nonlocally image an object. We report the influence of spatial transverse coherence property of a thermal source on GI and GICS and show that, using the same acquisition nu
mbers, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of images recovered by GI will be reduced while the quality of reconstructed images will be enhanced for GICS as the spatial transverse coherence lengths located on the object plane are decreased. Differences between GI and GICS, methods to further improve the quality and image extraction efficiency of GICS, and its potential applications are also discussed.
Much more image details can be resolved by improving the systems imaging resolution and enhancing the resolution beyond the systems Rayleigh diffraction limit is generally called super-resolution. By combining the sparse prior property of images with
the ghost imaging method, we demonstrated experimentally that super-resolution imaging can be nonlocally achieved in the far field even without looking at the object. Physical explanation of super-resolution ghost imaging via compressive sampling and its potential applications are also discussed.
For ghost imaging, pursuing high resolution images and short acquisition times required for reconstructing images are always two main goals. We report an image reconstruction algorithm called compressive sampling (CS) reconstruction to recover ghost
images. By CS reconstruction, ghost imaging with both super-resolution and a good signal-to-noise ratio can be obtained via short acquisition times. Both effect influencing and approaches further improving the resolution of ghost images via CS reconstruction, relationship between ghost imaging and CS theory are also discussed.
Imaging with the second-order correlation of two light fields is a method to image an object by two-photon interference involving a joint detection of two photons at distant space-time points. We demonstrate for the first time that an image with high
quality can still be obtained in the scattering media by applying the second-order correlation of illuminating light field. The scattering effect on the visibility of images is analyzed both theoretically and experimentally. Potential applications and the methods to further improve the visibility of the images in scattering media are also discussed.
