Frame-Filtered Ghost Imaging with a Single-Photon Detector Array at Low-Intensity Pseudo-Thermal Light

   Here we present an experiment on ghost imaging with a pseudo-thermal light source and a single-photon detector array. In the experiment, the light intensity is taken to be so low that the photon detection rate is comparable to the dark counts rate. To minimize the influence of dark counts on the ghost image (GI) and reduce fluctuations in the speckle pattern of the image, the measured data is filtered frame by frame by the number of detected counts per frame, and the GI is smoothed using a moving short-range averaging. We have found that optimizing the filtering procedure leads to a significant reduction in the data acquisition time (down to several seconds) required for obtaining a high-quality GI.

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