A new compressive imaging camera architecture using optical-domain compression

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.