Detailed quality analysis of ideal high-order thermal ghost imaging

Abstract

The performances of ideal high-order thermal ghost imaging, including conventional high-order ghost imaging, background-subtracted high-order ghost imaging (BSGI), and intensity fluctuation high-order ghost imaging (IFGI), are compared in this paper. The detailed quality analyses of the three high-order ghost imaging algorithms are demonstrated. The signal-to-background ratio and contrast-to-noise ratio of the pattern-normalized high-order ghost imaging with an arbitrary-pixel object are deduced, which are in great agreement with the experimental results. Experimental results indicate that the best performance is achieved by the lowest-order BSGI or the lowest-order IFGI.