Far-field super-resolution ghost imaging with a deep neural network constraint

Ghost imaging (GI) facilitates image acquisition under low-light conditions by single-pixel measurements and thus has great potential in applications in various fields ranging from biomedical imaging to remote sensing. However, GI usually requires a large amount of single-pixel samplings in order to reconstruct a high-resolution image, imposing a practical limit for its applications. Here we propose a far-field super-resolution GI technique that incorporates the physical model for GI image formation into a deep neural network. The resulting hybrid neural network does not need to pre-train on any dataset, and allows the reconstruction of a far-field image with the resolution beyond the diffraction limit. Furthermore, the physical model imposes a constraint to the network output, making it effectively interpretable. We experimentally demonstrate the proposed GI technique by imaging a flying drone, and show that it outperforms some other widespread GI techniques in terms of both spatial resolution and sampling ratio. We believe that this study provides a new framework for GI, and paves a way for its practical applications.