Recently, by replacing the fundamental Gaussian pump with structured light in ghost imaging, Prof. Lixiang Chen’s team in college of physical science and technology demonstrated a face recognition protocol that works without complex image analysis algorithms. On March 26, this work, entitled “Structured-pump-enabled quantum pattern recognition”, was published in Physical Review Letters. It’s worth noting that this letter was selected as Editor’s Suggestion. The Physics website of the American Physical Society has also recommended this work with “Synopsis: Face Recognition with Ghost Imaging”.
As is well known, pattern recognition plays a key role in the field of information security. Compared using an electronic computer, optical pattern recognition possesses an inherent capacity for massive parallel processing. In addition, quantum-correlation-based ghost imaging, also termed quantum ghost imaging, has found applications as diverse as the fundamental tests of quantum mechanics and low-light-level imaging, and thus also draws public’s attention in recent years.
Unlike traditional ghost imaging, Prof. Chen’s team encoded the spatial spectrum of reference face onto a two-photon wave function via the structured pump, and constructed a quantum equivalence of a Vander Lugt filter. Specifically, the idler photons were used to illuminate the tested object, while the signal photons that never interact with the tested object are used to produce the correlation signal nonlocally. It’s worth noting that, the proposed scheme works at the single photon level. Therefore, the tested object cannot be aware of when and where they are illuminated and recognized, which could be useful for security applications.
Prof. Chen’s team focuses on the light engineering and its application on the quantum information. In recent years, they have made a series of progresses: Physical Review Letters 112, 153601 (2014); Light: Science & Applications 3, e153 (2014); Laser & Photonics Reviews 11, 1600163 (2017, Inside Cover); Physical Review A 95, 023821 (2017, Editors’ suggestion); 98, 042134 (2018, Kaleidoscope); Optica 5, 208 (2018); Physical Review Applied 10, 044014 (2018) et al.
Ph. D student, Xiaodong Qiu, and Prof. Lixiang Chen are the first author and the corresponding author of the paper respectively. This work is supported by the Collaborative Innovation Center for Optoelectronic Semiconductors and Efficient Devices, Jiujiang Research Institute, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities at Xiamen University.
Paper link：
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.123901
APS Physics report link：
https://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.123901
