With its pronounced photon-fluctuation characteristics, superthermal light provides a fundamental physical basis for overcoming the long-standing bottlenecks of sampling efficiency and image quality in conventional optical imaging. Building on previous demonstrations of superthermal ghost imaging, this work integrates a superthermal light source generated by secondary speckle modulation with compressive-sensing ghost imaging reconstruction into a unified imaging framework. Through two independent speckle modulations, a superthermal light field with a $g^{(2)}(0)$ value enhanced from the thermal level of approximately 2 to nearly 4 is successfully generated, and the derived expression of $g^{(2)}(0)$ depends on the effective mode-number parameter and coherence length of the optical field. Under the sampling conditions studied here, this integrated approach improves the target-background separation and the quality of compressive-sensing reconstruction, demonstrating the application potential of engineered superthermal statistics in advanced optical imaging.

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• Ghost imaging
• Optical coherence
• Photon statistics
• Structured light