Quantified Advantage of Ghost Imaging over Regular Imaging

TL;DR

This paper provides a quantitative analysis demonstrating that ghost imaging can outperform regular imaging in terms of signal-to-noise ratio when detectors are noisy, supported by theoretical and numerical evidence.

Contribution

It derives a closed-form expression for the signal-to-noise ratio in ghost imaging and quantifies its advantage over regular imaging under noisy detector conditions.

Findings

Ghost imaging can have higher SNR than regular imaging with noisy detectors.

The advantage is quantifiable and depends on detector noise levels.

Numerical simulations confirm the theoretical results.

Abstract

Ghost imaging is a remarkable technique where light that never interacts with an object is detected with a camera and still the image of the object is recorded. The method relies on the use of correlated light and an additional bucket detector. Ghost imaging has been used in archaeology, bio-medicine, for seeing through turbid media, and promises X-ray imaging improvements, amongst many other applications. However, the advantage of ghost imaging over regular imaging can be difficult to quantify. For classical ghost imaging of a single pixel aperture (the object), we find a closed analytic expression for the signal-to-noise ratio using basic statistics. We find that this signal-to-noise ratio can exceed that of regular imaging with the same exposure of the aperture when the detectors are sufficiently noisy, illustrating a simple and quantifiable advantage. Numerical simulation confirms the theoretical analysis.