A compressive sensing based transmissive single-pixel camera

Compressive sensing (CS) has recently emerged and is now a subject of increasing research and discussion, undergoing significant advances at an incredible pace. The novel theory of CS provides a fundamentally new approach to data acquisition which overcomes the common wisdom of information theory, specifically that provided by the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem. Perhaps surprisingly, it predicts that certain signals or images can be accurately, and sometimes even exactly, recovered from what was previously believed to be highly incomplete measurements (information). As the requirements of many applications nowadays often exceed the capabilities of traditional imaging architectures, there has been an increasing deal of interest in so-called computational imaging (CI). CI systems are hybrid imagers in which computation assumes a central role in the image formation process. Therefore, in the light of CS theory, we present a transmissive single-pixel camera that integrates a liquid crystal display (LCD) as an incoherent random coding device, yielding CS-typical compressed observations, since the beginning of the image acquisition process. This camera has been incorporated into an optical microscope and the obtained results can be exploited towards the development of compressive-sensing-based cameras for pixel-level adaptive gain imaging or fluorescence microscopy.