Ghost Radiography of Complex Samples with Speckle Illumination

We report a synchrotron-based demonstration of X-ray ghost imaging using a partially coherent beam modulated by a disordered scattering membrane to generate speckle patterns. The experiment employed a sample in/sample out measurement strategy, using an Elettaria cardamomum seedpod, a structurally complex biological specimen, to evaluate reconstruction performance across multiple algorithms: classical ghost imaging (GI), differential ghost imaging (DGI), total variation (TV) regularization solved via alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and plug-and-play ADMM incorporating a pretrained deep residual u-net (DRUNet) denoiser. Our experimental results show that while traditional GI techniques provide limited fidelity, prior-based reconstruction offer a substantial improvement in image quality. These findings establish modern, optimization-driven methods as powerful tools for high-resolution X-ray GI of nontrivial samples.