To extract effectively the absorber information embedded in a homogeneous scattering medium in the transmission geometry, a method of taking the ratio of the output intensity in a measured medium to that in a reference medium is evaluated. The reference medium is a virtual one with the same scattering coefficient distribution as that of the measured medium, but with a uniform absorption coefficient distribution. Numerical results show that the proposed method can enhance the output signal by extracting the ballistic-like component. We also apply a backprojection method to reconstruct the single absorber using many pairs of input and output intensity ratio distributions. The reconstruction position error and the quantitative measurement of absorption coefficient are discussed.