Nuit Blanche: A Parallel Compressive Imaging Architecture for One-Shot Acquisition

After the Rice Light Field Video camera, the UBC Low-budget Time of Flight Camera and the MIT Time of Flight Cameras, all compressive sensing systems, here is another one: A Parallel Compressive Imaging Architecture for One-Shot Acquisition by Tomas Björklund, Enrico Magli

A limitation of many compressive imaging architectures lies in the sequential nature of the sensing process, which leads to long sensing times. In this paper we present a novel architecture that uses fewer detectors than the number of reconstructed pixels and is able to acquire the image in a single acquisition. This paves the way for the development of video architectures that acquire several frames per second. We specifically address the diffraction problem, showing that deconvolution normally used to recover diffraction blur can be replaced by convolution of the sensing matrix, and how measurements of a 0/1 physical sensing matrix can be converted to -1/1 compressive sensing matrix without any extra acquisitions. Simulations of our architecture show that the image quality is comparable to that of a classic Compressive Imaging camera, whereas the proposed architecture avoids long acquisition times due to sequential sensing. This one-shot procedure also allows to employ a fixed sensing matrix instead of a complex device such as a Digital Micro Mirror array or Spatial Light Modulator. It also enables imaging at bandwidths where these are not efficient.

In all these systems much expense goes into carefully controlling light. Here is an idea, what about letting Nature do the job [1].