Imaging with a small number of photons

By P. Morris, R. Aspden, Jessica Bell, R. W. Boyd, Miles J. Padgett. Nature Communications, 2014

444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Low-light-level imaging techniques have application in many diverse fields, ranging from biological sciences to security. A high-quality digital camera based on a multi-megapixel array will typically record an image by collecting of order 105 photons per pixel, but by how much could this photon flux be reduced? In this work we demonstrate a single-photon imaging system based on a time-gated intensified camera from which the image of an object can be inferred from very few detected photons. We show that a ghost-imaging configuration, where the image is obtained from photons that have never interacted with the object, is a useful approach for obtaining images with high signal-to-noise ratios. The use of heralded single photons ensures that the background counts can be virtually eliminated from the recorded images. By applying principles of image compression and associated image reconstruction, we obtain high-quality images of objects from raw data formed from an average of fewer than one detected photon per image pixel. Advances in low-light-level imaging techniques have shown that imaging in the one photon per pixel regime is possible. Here, Morris et al. demonstrate high-quality image reconstruction using ghost and heralded imaging with less than one photon per image pixel with a time-gated intensified camera.

Subfields: Acoustics and Ultrasonics, Artificial Intelligence, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8c9733c52546bdd1faf11fe5973d91546e45c42

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum metrology and its application in biology (2014, methodology): “trolled generation of entangled photons which is used in PET. This enables a far broader range of applications. Entangled photon pairs have now been applied in tissue imaging [15], absorption imaging [14], and refractive index sensing of a protein solution [26]; squeezed states of light have been us”
Imaging with quantum states of light (2019, methodology): “For example, an implementation of a technique called ’heralded imaging’ allows the use of quantum temporal correlations to trigger an intensified CCD camera for ∼ 4ns only when a signal photon that has probed an object is likely to strike the sensor [128].”
Roadmap on structured light (2016, background): “fewer than one photon per pixel in the final image [90].”