For remote sensing, high-resolution imaging techniques are helpful to catch more characteristic information of the target. We extend pseudo-thermal light ghost imaging to the area of remote imaging and propose a ghost imaging lidar system. For the first time, we demonstrate experimentally that the real-space image of a target at about 1.0 km range with 20 mm resolution is achieved by ghost imaging via sparsity constraints (GISC) technique. The characters of GISC technique compared to the existing lidar systems are also discussed.

The image information acquisition ability of a conventional camera is usually much lower than the Shannon Limit since it does not make use of the correlation between pixels of image data. Applying a random phase modulator to code the spectral images and combining with compressive sensing (CS) theory, a spectral camera based on true thermal light ghost imaging via sparsity constraints (GISC spectral camera) is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. GISC spectral camera can acquire the information at a rate significantly below the Nyquist rate, and the resolution of the cells in the three-dimensional (3D) spectral images data-cube can be achieved with a two-dimensional (2D) detector in a single exposure. For the first time, GISC spectral camera opens the way of approaching the Shannon Limit determined by Information Theory in optical imaging instruments.

Road extraction in remote sensed images using stochastic geometry framework AIP Conf. Proc. 568, 531 (2001); 10.1063/1.1381915 SWUIS-A compact astronomical UV/VIS/IR imaging system for manned space-based platforms including the space shuttle and the international space station AIP Conf.

A structured image reconstruction method has been proposed to obtain high quality images in three-dimensional ghost imaging lidar. By considering the spatial structure relationship between recovered images of scene slices at different longitudinal distances, orthogonality constraint has been incorporated to reconstruct the three-dimensional scenes in remote sensing. Numerical simulations have been performed to demonstrate that scene slices with various sparse ratios can be recovered more accurately by applying orthogonality constraint, and the enhancement is significant especially for ghost imaging with less measurements. A simulated three-dimensional city scene has been successfully reconstructed by using structured image reconstruction in three-dimensional ghost imaging lidar.