100 Mfps ghost imaging with wavelength division multiplexing

Abstract

Ghost imaging (GI) and single-pixel imaging (SPI) techniques enable image reconstruction without spatially resolved detectors, offering unique access to wide spectral ranges and challenging imaging environments. Yet, their adoption has been limited by the slow generation of mask patterns, which constrains achievable frame rates. Here, we demonstrate ultrafast GI that achieves a spatial-temporal information flux of 78.4 gigapixels per second across five wavelengths, which is at least two orders of magnitude larger than that reported for previous training-data-free GI approaches. This breakthrough is enabled by 25 GHz speckle pattern switching and allows parallelizing the pattern illumination using a wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technique. We show that the proposed approach is capable of reconstructing 28$\times$28-pixel images at the exposure time of 10 ns, achieving 100 megaframes per second (Mfps), and demonstrate the GI of a microsecond-scale dynamic event. This approach opens avenues for studying rapid processes in physics, chemistry, and biology, where conventional cameras are limited by detector bandwidth, readout speed, or cost.