Ghost imaging with nonuniform thermal light fields

In practical thermal light ghost imaging, the nonuniform intensity distribution of the thermal light applied causes distortion of the retrieved image. We propose uniformly weighted arithmetics, including uniformly weighted ghost imaging and uniformly weighted differential ghost imaging (UWDGI), to improve the imaging quality of ghost imaging with nonuniform thermal light fields. Two kinds of nonuniform thermal light fields are discussed, including planar Gaussian distributed thermal light and near-field three-dimensional thermal light. The retrieved image using a uniformly weighted arithmetic has a lower distortion than that using the corresponding traditional ghost imaging arithmetic. In addition, the best imaging quality is achieved with the UWDGI arithmetic. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America