High-quality coherent ghost imaging of a transmission target.

When the test detector of ghost imaging (GI) is a point-like detector and the detector's transverse size is smaller than the transverse coherence length of the light field at the detection plane, this case is corresponding to coherent GI (CGI) and the imaging result recovered by traditional GI (TGI) reconstruction algorithm is usually bad for a transmission target. Here a CGI scheme of a transmission target is proposed and a corresponding CGI reconstruction algorithm is developed to stably recover the target's image. The validity of the proposed method is verified by both simulation and experiments. Both the simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the target's transmission function can be perfectly reconstructed by CGI. We also show that the imaging quality of CGI with a point-like detector is better than that of TGI with a bucket detector if detection noise exists in the sampling process. Performance comparisons between CGI reconstruction and TGI reconstruction are also discussed.