We report the quantum-enhanced metal target detection based on quantum illumination, and experimentally verified that quantum illumination still helps low-reflectivity target detection in photon loss scenarios. The results show that the signal-to-noise ratio and target recognition ability of the quantum detection system are more than 10 times stronger than those of the classical detection under the same thermal noise conditions. We believe that the photon-counting based QI protocol, for its robustness to noise and losses, has a huge potentiality to promote the usage of quantum correlated light in real environments.
We report a five-step processing algorithm for photon counting depth imaging under strong background noise environment, and experimentally verified that this method can realize single photon counting 3D imaging under signalto-noise ratio (SNR) less than 1. In order to accurately locate the target position when the ambient flux is high, a computational pile-up correction is performed to recover the underlying signal photons, then performing an adaptively full-pixel target position locating. After the target position is determined, the signal and noise photons are separated pixel-wisely using a cluster method. Pixels which have no arrival photons are filled by using the information from neighborhood. At last, by using total variation spatial regularization, the depth images are reconstructed accurately. To validate the proposed method, a single photon counting 3D imaging system is established and experiments at different noise levels are carried out. Experimental results show that accurate depth imaging can be reconstructed with the SNR as low as 0.41. This approach is suitable for depth imaging under high background noise and also very suitable for the noncooperative target imaging with no prior knowledge of the target distance for its adaptive range gating.
Using the entangled photons generated by the spontaneous parametric down conversion as a light source, we demonstrate the first quantum ghost imaging system with a modified compressive sensing technique based on the spatial correlation of sensing matrix (SCCS). The ghost image is achieved at 16.27% sampling ratio of raster scanning and 0.65 photons/pixel at each measurement on average. Our results show that image quality and photon-utilization efficiency are remarkably enhanced in comparison with the traditional compressive imaging technique, due to the sensing matrix and noise-free measurement vector rebuilt by SCCS technique. It suggests the great potential of SCCS technique applied in quantum imaging and other quantum optics fields, such as quantum charactering and quantum state tomography to use the information loaded in each photon with high efficiency.
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