Abstract

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

Citations