Humans are visual animals, and imaging sensors that extend our reach – cameras – have improved dramatically in recent times thanks to the introduction of CCD and CMOS digital technology. Consumer digital cameras in the mega-pixel range are now ubiquitous thanks to the happy coincidence that the semiconductor material of choice for large-scale electronics integration (silicon) also happens to readily convert photons at visual wavelengths into electrons. On the contrary, imaging at wavelengths where silicon is blind is considerably more complicated, bulky, and expensive. Thus, for comparable resolution, a $500 digital camera for the visible becomes a $50,000 camera for the infrared. In this paper, we present a new approach to building simpler, smaller, and cheaper digital cameras that can operate efficiently across a much broader spectral range than conventional silicon-based cameras. Our approach fuses a new camera architecture based on a digital mi-cromirror device (DMD – see Sidebar: Spatial Light Modulators) with the new mathematical theory and algorithms of compressive sampling (CS – see Sidebar: Compressive Sampling in a Nutshell). CS combines sampling and compression into a single nonadaptive linear measurement process [1–4]. Rather than measuring pixel samples of the scene under view, we measure inner products

Compressive Sensing is an emerging field based on the revelation that a small number of linear projections of a compressible signal contain enough information for reconstruction and processing. It has many promising implications and enables the design of new kinds of Compressive Imaging systems and cameras. In this paper, we develop a new camera architecture that employs a digital micromirror array to perform optical calculations of linear projections of an image onto pseudorandom binary patterns. Its hallmarks include the ability to obtain an image with a single detection element while sampling the image fewer times than the number of pixels. Other attractive properties include its universality, robustness, scalability, progressivity, and computational asymmetry. The most intriguing feature of the system is that, since it relies on a single photon detector, it can be adapted to image at wavelengths that are currently impossible with conventional CCD and CMOS imagers.

Humans are visual animals, and imaging sensors that extend our reach— cameras—have improved dramatically in recent times thanks to the introduction of CCD and CMOS digital technology. Consumer digital cameras in the megapixel range are now ubiquitous thanks to the happy coincidence that the semiconductor material of choice for large-scale electronics integration (silicon) also happens to readily convert photons at visual wavelengths into electrons. On the contrary, imaging at wavelengths where silicon is blind is considerably more complicated, bulky, and expensive. Thus, for comparable resolution, a US$500 digital camera for the visible becomes a US$50,000 camera for the infrared. In this article, we present a new approach to building simpler, smaller, and cheaper digital cameras that can operate efficiently across a much broader spectral range than conventional silicon-based cameras. Our approach fuses a new camera architecture Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2007.914730 1053-5888/08/$25.00©2008IEEE IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [83] MARCH 2008based on a digital micromirror device (DMD—see “Spatial Light Modulators”) with the new mathematical theory and algorithms of compressive sampling (CS—see “CS in a Nutshell”). CS combines sampling and compression into a single nonadaptive linear measurement process [1]–[4]. Rather than measuring pixel samples of the scene under view, we measure inner products between the scene and a set of test functions. Interestingly, random test functions play a key role, making each measurement a random sum of pixel values taken across the entire image. When the scene under view is compressible by an algorithm like JPEG or JPEG2000, the CS theory enables us to stably reconstruct an image of the scene from fewer measurements than the number of reconstructed pixels. In this manner we achieve sub-Nyquist image acquisition.

Humans are visual animals, and imaging sensors that extend our reach – cameras – have improved dramatically in recent times thanks to the introduction of CCD and CMOS digital technology. Consumer digital cameras in the mega-pixel range are now ubiquitous thanks to the happy coincidence that the semiconductor material of choice for large-scale electronics integration (silicon) also happens to readily convert photons at visual wavelengths into electrons. On the contrary, imaging at wavelengths where silicon is blind is considerably more complicated, bulky, and expensive. Thus, for comparable resolution, a $500 digital camera for the visible becomes a $50,000 camera for the infrared. In this paper, we present a new approach to building simpler, smaller, and cheaper digital cameras that can operate efficiently across a much broader spectral range than conventional silicon-based cameras. Our approach fuses a new camera architecture based on a digital micromirror device (DMD – see Sidebar: Spatial Light Modulators) with the new mathematical theory and algorithms of compressive sampling (CS – see Sidebar: Compressive Sampling in a Nutshell). CS combines sampling and compression into a single nonadaptive linear measurement process [1–4]. Rather than measuring pixel samples of the scene under view, we measure inner products

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