Multispectral computational ghost imaging with multiplexed illumination

Abstract: Computational ghost imaging is a robust and compact system that has drawn wide attentions over the last two decades. Multispectral imaging possesses spatial and spectral resolving abilities, is very useful for surveying scenes and extracting detailed information. Existing multispectral imagers mostly utilize narrow band filters or dispersive optical devices to separate lights of different wavelengths, and then use multiple bucket detectors or an array detector to record them separately. Here, we propose a novel multispectral ghost imaging method that uses one single bucket detector with multiplexed illumination to produce colored image. The multiplexed illumination patterns are produced by three binary encoded matrices (corresponding to red, green, blue colored information, respectively) and random patterns. The results of simulation and experiment have verified that our method can be effective to recover the colored object. Our method has two major advantages: one is that the binary encoded matrices as cipher keys can protect the security of private contents; the other is that multispectral images are produced simultaneously by one single-pixel detector, which significantly reduces the amount of the data acquisition.