Omnidirectional ghost imaging system and unwrapping-free panoramic ghost imaging

Ghost imaging (GI) is an unconventional imaging method that reconstructs the object information via light-intensity correlation measurements. However, at present, the field of view (FOV) of this method is limited to the illumination range of light patterns. To enlarge the FOV of GI efficiently, we propose an omnidirectional GI system (OGIS) that can achieve a 360 degrees omnidirectional FOV only via the addition of a curved mirror. The OGIS features retina-like annular patterns designed as a log-polar structure and can obtain the undistorted unwrapping-free panoramic images with uniformresolution. This research presents a new, to the best of our knowledge, perspective for the applications of GI, such as pipeline detection, a panoramic situation awareness for autonomous vehicles. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America