Image transfer through a chaotic channel by intensity correlations

The three-wave mixing processes in a second-order nonlinear medium can be used for imaging protocols, in which an object field is injected into the nonlinear medium together with a reference field and an image field is generated. When the reference field is chaotic, the image field is also chaotic and does not carry any information about the object. We show that a clear image of the object can be extracted from the chaotic image field by measuring the spatial intensity correlations between this field and one Fourier component of the reference. We experimentally verify this imaging protocol in the case of difference-frequency generation.