100 Mfps ghost imaging with wavelength division multiplexing

TL;DR

This paper presents a groundbreaking ultrafast ghost imaging method achieving 100 Mfps by leveraging wavelength division multiplexing and high-speed speckle pattern switching, enabling rapid imaging of dynamic events beyond traditional camera limits.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel high-speed ghost imaging technique using 25 GHz speckle switching and wavelength multiplexing, significantly surpassing previous frame rate capabilities without training data.

Findings

Achieved 78.4 Gpixels/sec information flux across five wavelengths.

Reconstructed 28x28 pixel images at 10 ns exposure time.

Demonstrated imaging of microsecond-scale dynamic events.

Abstract

Ghost imaging (GI) and single-pixel imaging (SPI) techniques enable image reconstruction without spatially resolved detectors, offering unique access to wide spectral ranges and challenging imaging environments. Yet, their adoption has been limited by the slow generation of mask patterns, which constrains achievable frame rates. Here, we demonstrate ultrafast GI that achieves a spatial-temporal information flux of 78.4 gigapixels per second across five wavelengths, which is at least two orders of magnitude larger than that reported for previous training-data-free GI approaches. This breakthrough is enabled by 25 GHz speckle pattern switching and allows parallelizing the pattern illumination using a wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technique. We show that the proposed approach is capable of reconstructing 28$\times$28-pixel images at the exposure time of 10 ns, achieving 100 megaframes per second (Mfps), and demonstrate the GI of a microsecond-scale dynamic event. This approach opens avenues for studying rapid processes in physics, chemistry, and biology, where conventional cameras are limited by detector bandwidth, readout speed, or cost.