Quantifying the advantage of Ghost imaging over Regular imaging

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 is difficult to quantify. We searched for a simple example that can be quantified with basic statistics for the purpose of education. Using classical computational ghost imaging, we find that the signal-to-noise ratio for ghost imaging of a slit (the object) can exceed that of regular imaging with the same exposure of the slit when the detectors are sufficiently noisy. As a function of exposure the ghost imaging signal to noise starts to exceed that of regular imaging when the exposure is less than one photon per realization. It is also shown that the signal to noise of gated imaging under the same circumstances is similar to ghost imaging, while when the exposure exceeds one photon per realization, gated imaging approached regular imaging [1]. These result are obtained by numerical simulation and by theoretical analysis of the imaging techniques [2]. We propose an experiment to demonstrate this quantitative imaging advantage.

[1] Morris, P. A., Aspden, R. S., Bell, J. E., Boyd, R. W., & Padgett, M. J. (2015). Imaging with a small number of photons. Nature communications, 6(1), 5913.

[2] Ganesan, A., & Batelaan, H. (2022). Quantified Advantage of Ghost Imaging over Regular Imaging. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.01709.