Image reconstruction and discrimination at low light levels

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Institute of Optics, 2013.Quantum imaging is a recent and promising branch of quantum optics that exploits the quantum nature of light. Improving the limitations imposed by classical sources of light in optical imaging techniques or overcoming the classical boundaries of image formation is one of the key motivations in quantum imaging. In this thesis, I describe certain aspects of both quantum and thermal ghost imaging and I also study image discrimination with high fidelity at low light levels. First of all, I present a theoretical and experimental study of entangled-photon compressive ghost imaging. In quantum ghost imaging using entangled photon pairs, the brightness of readily available sources is rather weak. The usual technique of image acquisition in this imaging modality is to raster scan a single-pixel single-photon sensitive detector in one arm of a ghost imaging setup. In most imaging modalities, the number of measurements required to fully resolve an object is dependent on the measurement’s Nyquist limit. In the first part of the thesis, I propose a ghost imaging (GI) configuration that uses bucket detectors (as opposed to a raster scanning detector) in both arms of the GI setup. High resolution image reconstruction using only 27% of the measurement’s Nyquist limit using compressed sensing algorithms are presented. The second part of my thesis deals with thermal ghost imaging. Unlike in quantum GI, bright and spatially correlated classical sources of radiation are used in thermal GI. Usually high-contrast speckle patterns are used as sources of the correlated beams of radiation. I study the effect of the field statistics of the illuminating source on the quality of ghost images. I show theoretically and experimentally that a thermal GI setup can produce high quality images even when low-contrast (intensity-averaged) speckle patterns are used as an illuminating source, as long as the collected signal is mainly caused by the random fluctuation of the incident speckle field, as opposed to other noise sources. In addition, I describe transverse image discrimination and recognition using holographic matched filtering techniques using heralded single photons from a spontaneous parametric downconversion source. Heralded single photons are used for encoding and discriminating images from our predefined orthogonal basis set. Our basis set constitutes two locally spatially orthogonal objects. We show that if the object is a member of a predefined set, we can discriminate the objects in the set with high confidence levels