Parallel encoding in optically multiplexed image camera for temporal resolution improvement

Abstract

An optically multiplexed image camera often requires a photodetector for image sensing in conjunction with an optical multiplexer, such as a digital micromirror device or an amplitude spatial light modulator. For this type of camera, the advantages of using one photodetector, unfortunately, can be outrun by the fairly large acquisition time, consumed in the image multiplexing process. Therefore, we propose a solution to efficiently improve the image acquisition time span and to relax the computational burden in the reconstruction process. Our camera design incorporates a reflection optical multiplexer, for image encoding, in conjunction with multiple photodetectors. The working principle relies on sequential image encoding using multiple low-resolution sets of binary masks, applied synchronously. The reconstructed data sets form the segments of the final image, which are stitched together with dark boundary pixels.