Sub-Nyquist ghost imaging by optimizing point spread function

Point spread function (PSF) of ghost imaging (GI) with pseudo-thermal light source doesn’t satisfy the property of space translation invariance and existing GI linear reconstruction algorithms offer images with low quality when the measurement process doesn’t reach ergodic. By modifying the intensity value of the speckle patterns recorded by the camera in the reference path, the property of PSF can be optimized and a linear reconstruction method called optimized ghost imaging (OGI) is proposed to stably recover the object’s image even in the measurements below Nyquist limit. In comparison with existing GI linear reconstruction algorithms, both the simulated and experimental results demonstrate that the image’s SNR can be significantly enhanced by OGI especially when the sampling ratio is larger than 0.68 and the detection SNR is greater than 20 dB.