Signal-to-noise properties of correlation plenoptic imaging with chaotic light

Correlation plenoptic imaging (CPI) is an imaging technique that exploits the correlations between the intensity fluctuations of light to perform the typical tasks of plenoptic imaging (namely, refocusing out-of-focus parts of the scene, extending the depth of field, and performing three-dimensional reconstruction) without entailing a loss of spatial resolution. Here, we consider two different CPI schemes based on chaotic light, both employing ghost imaging: the first one to image the object, the second one to image the focusing element. We characterize their noise properties in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and compare their performances. We find that the SNR can be significantly easier to control in the second CPI scheme involving standard imaging of the object; under adequate conditions, this scheme enables the number of frames for achieving the same SNR to be reduced by 1 order of magnitude.