Applications and Principle Designs of Ghost Imaging

Abstract

Ghost Imaging (GI) is an emerging imaging technique which originated from quantum and optical areas. GI can achieve 2-dimensional (2D) and 3-dimensional (3D) reconstructions of objects without direct involvements of spatial resolving detectors. Starting from its first experimental demonstration back to 1995, GI has drawn much attention and has been now adopted to other imaging scenarios besides optical as well. As for its potential applications in microwave imaging, I first introduce GI into the scenario of Through-wall Imaging (TWI) by using chaotic modulated signals and an array of antennas to illuminate the scenario. Then a high-resolution image of target objects is obtained by using modified reconstruction method from optical GI. As for the second approach in investigations of microwave GI, I further consider extending the indoor TWI scenario to the surveillance upon urban areas. By replacing the chaotic modulated signal with long-term-evolution (LTE) and Wi-Fi signals, the proposed system can be further integrated into existing communication networks. Then in order to reduce the difficulty in practical implementations of microwave GI, I propose a novel microwave GI scheme based on non-random EM fields. By applying purposely designed EM fields to illuminate the imaging scenario, both the requirement of randomness and the involvement of field estimations in traditional microwave GI has been removed. Motivated by the fact that both communication and imaging can be considered as an information transfer process, I integrate error-control-coding (ECC) techniques into the physical imaging procedure of GI. The proof-of-concept experiment validates that the object image can be effectively reconstructed while errors induced by noisy reception can be significantly reduced under this new scheme. The demonstrated approach informs a new imaging technique: ECC assisted imaging, which can be scaled into applications such as remote sensing, spectroscopy and biomedical imaging.