A faster single-pixel camera
Compressed sensing is an exciting new computational technique for extracting large amounts of information from a signal. In one high-profile demonstration, for instance, researchers at Rice University built a camera that could produce 2-D images using only a single light sensor rather than the millions of light sensors found in a commodity camera. But using compressed sensing for image acquisition is inefficient: That “single-pixel camera” needed thousands of exposures to produce a reasonably clear image. Reporting their results in the journal IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, researchers from the MIT Media Lab now describe a new technique that makes image acquisition using compressed sensing 50 times as efficient. In the case of the single-pixel camera, it could get the number of exposures down from thousands to dozens. One intriguing aspect of compressed-sensing imaging systems is that, unlike conventional cameras, they don’t require lenses. That could make them useful in harsh environments or...