Optimization of thermal ghost imaging: high-order correlations vs background subtraction

We compare the performance of high-order thermal ghost imaging with that of conventional (that is, lowest-order) thermal ghost imaging for different data processing methods. Particular attention is given to high-order thermal ghost imaging with background normalization and conventional ghost imaging with background subtraction. The contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the ghost image is used as the figure of merit for the comparison.We find analytically that the CNR of the normalized high-order ghost image is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of transmitting pixels of the object. This scaling law is independent of the exponents used in calculating the high-order correlation and is the same as that of conventional ghost imaging with background subtraction. We find that no data processing procedure performs better than lowest-order ghost imaging with background subtraction. Our results are found to be able to explain the observations of a recent experiment [Chen et al., arXiv:0902.3713v3 [quant-ph]].