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Military Pioneers “Ghost Imaging” Technology

The U.S. Air Force’s research arm, the Office of Scientific Research, has pioneered a new visualization technology called “ghost-imaging,” which uses light to create images of objects the light has never interacted with.

Ghost-imaging is similar to taking a flash-lit photo of an object using a normal camera. The image forms from photons that come out of the flash, bounce off the object, and then are focused through the lens onto photo-reactive film or a charge-coupled array.

In 1995, Yanhua Shih, a professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, pushed over the first domino that has now led to maging research in an experiment involving entangled photons. Shih directed a single photon through stenciled patterns in a mask, which triggered a detector that captured another photon with a second detector. The process left an image of the pattern between the two detectors, which has since become known as ghost-imaging.

Recently, Dr. Shih and fellow researchers, Drs. Ron Meyers and Keith Deacon of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, generated ghost images of a toy soldier (featured above) with thermal light.

In an article entitled “Reflection of a Ghost” that appeared in April’s Physical Review, fellow researcher Dr. Keith Deacon indicates that ghost-imaging appears promising for future application to satellite technology. Dr. Deacon says ghost-imaging could allow satellite equipped with a detector and a camera system to take images of the sun, creating ghost images of the Earth’s surface.