Toward practical compressed sensing
The last 10 years have seen a flurry of research on an emerging technology called compressed sensing. Compressed sensing does something that seems miraculous: It extracts more information from a signal than the signal would appear to contain. One of the most celebrated demonstrations of the technology came in 2006, when Rice University researchers produced images with a resolution of tens of thousands of pixels using a camera whose sensor had only one pixel.Compressed sensing promises dramatic reductions in the cost and power consumption of a wide range of imaging and signal-processing applications. But it’s been slow to catch on commercially, in part because of a general skepticism that sophisticated math ever works as well in practice as it does in theory. Researchers at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) hope to change that, with a new mathematical...