Reflective ghost imaging through turbulence

Recent work has indicated that ghost imaging may have applications in standoff sensing. However, most theoretical work has addressed transmission-based ghost imaging. To be a viable remote-sensing system, the ghost imager needs to image rough-surfaced targets in reflection through long, turbulent op...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hardy, Nicholas David, Shapiro, Jeffrey H.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society (APS) 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/69150
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6094-5861
Description
Summary:Recent work has indicated that ghost imaging may have applications in standoff sensing. However, most theoretical work has addressed transmission-based ghost imaging. To be a viable remote-sensing system, the ghost imager needs to image rough-surfaced targets in reflection through long, turbulent optical paths. We develop, within a Gaussian-state framework, expressions for the spatial resolution, image contrast, and signal-to-noise ratio of such a system. We consider rough-surfaced targets that create fully developed speckle in their returns and Kolmogorov-spectrum turbulence that is uniformly distributed along all propagation paths. We address both classical and nonclassical optical sources, as well as a computational ghost imager.