The influence of free-surface vortex on underwater ghost imaging

Abstract

Abstract The vortex generated in the gas–liquid interface may appear in the propagation path, and shows severe disturbance to light propagation, thus affects the final imaging. In this Letter, the influence from the vortex on underwater ghost imaging is investigated experimentally. We find a counter-intuitive phenomenon that imaging quality becomes worse when the vortex is close to the imaging target, which is absolutely different from the typical channel disturbances, such as atmospheric turbulence and scattering. This phenomenon can be explained by the influence mechanism of speckle variation and the effective data distribution on the bucket detector. Meanwhile, a modified imaging method based on the effective bucket samples is proposed to enhance imaging quality and verified in experiment.