Ghost imaging with the use of the variance of the difference photocurrent

A radical change has been proposed in the technique for obtaining so-called “ghost images,” i.e., images formed not in intensity distributions, but in the distributions of the higher moments of the intensity. The traditional method for detecting such an image is based on the measurement of the second-order intensity correlation functions. In the proposed method, the variance of the difference between the intensities of two light beams is measured rather than the correlation functions of these intensities. It has been shown theoretically that both the visibility of the image and the signal-to-noise ratio in this case are much higher than those in the traditional method.