Ghost Imaging Through a Supersonic Wind‐Induced Environment Under Weak Illumination

Abstract

In airborne imaging, wind‐induced random environment severely disturbs the imaging quality. Ghost imaging (GI) shows its potential application in airborne imaging due to the natural ability of anti‐interference and imaging at low light levels, however, the influence of wind‐induced random environment on GI is non‐negligible under low‐light detection. In this paper, GI through a wind‐induced random environment under low‐light detection is experimentally and numerically investigated. The experiment is performed with a wind tunnel, and the imaging quality decreases with wind velocity and detection signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR). The simulation model of GI under low‐light detection through this kind of environment is proposed, and simulation results match well with experiments. With the theoretical model, imaging results for the binary and grayscale object under supersonic wind region are discussed in detail, and the critical wind velocity under the influences of boundary‐layer thickness and object size are obtained. These results can find potential applications in optical imaging and can be used to estimate the effect of airflow on the imaging performance.