Optimization of retina-like illumination patterns in ghost imaging

Ghost imaging (GI) reconstructs images using a single-pixel or bucket detector, which has the advantages of scattering robustness, wide spectrum and beyond-visual-field imaging. However, this technique needs large amount of measurements to obtain a sharp image. There have been a lot of methods proposed to overcome this disadvantage. Retina-like patterns, as one of the compressive sensing approaches, enhance the imaging quality of region of interest (ROI) while not increase measurements. The design of the retina-like patterns determines the performance of the ROI in the reconstructed image. Unlike the conventional method to fill in ROI with random patterns, we propose to optimize retina-like patterns by filling in the ROI with the patterns containing the sparsity prior of objects. This proposed method is verified by simulations and experiments compared with conventional GI, retina-like GI and GI using patterns optimized by principal component analysis. The method using optimized retina-like patterns obtain the best imaging quality in ROI than other methods. Meanwhile, the good generalization ability of the optimized retina-like pattern is also verified. While designing the size and position of the ROI of retina-like pattern, the feature information of the target can be obtained to optimize the pattern of ROI. This proposed method paves the way for realizing high-quality GI.