Anti-scattering medium computational ghost imaging with modified Hadamard patterns

Abstract: Illumination patterns of computational ghost imaging (CGI) systems suffer from reduced contrast when passing through a scattering medium, which causes the effective information in the reconstruction result to be drowned out by noise. A two-dimensional (2D) Gaussian filter performs linear smoothing operation on the whole image for image denoising. It can be combined with linear reconstruction algorithms of CGI to obtain the noise-reduced results directly, without post-processing. However, it results in blurred image edges while performing denoising and, in addition, a suitable standard deviation is difficult to choose in advance, especially in an unknown scattering environment. In this work, we subtly exploit the characteristics of CGI to solve these two problems very well. A kind of modified Hadamard pattern based on the 2D Gaussian filter and the differential operation features of Hadamard-based CGI is developed. We analyze and demonstrate that using Hadamard patterns for illumination but using our developed modified Hadamard patterns for reconstruction (MHCGI) can enhance the robustness of CGI against turbid scattering medium. Our method not only helps directly obtain noise-reduced results without blurred edges but also requires only an approximate standard deviation, i.e., it can be set in advance. The experimental results on transmitted and reflected targets demonstrate the feasibility of our method. Our method helps to promote the practical application of CGI in the scattering environment.