Space–time compressive imaging

Abstract

Compressive imaging systems typically exploit the spatial correlation of the scene to facilitate a lower dimensional measurement relative to a conventional imaging system. In natural time-varying scenes there is a high degree of temporal correlation that may also be exploited to further reduce the number of measurements. In this work we analyze space-time compressive imaging using Karhunen-Loève (KL) projections for the read-noise-limited measurement case. Based on a comprehensive simulation study, we show that a KL-based space-time compressive imager offers higher compression relative to space-only compressive imaging. For a relative noise strength of 10% and reconstruction error of 10%, we find that space-time compressive imaging with 8×8×16 spatiotemporal blocks yields about 292× compression compared to a conventional imager, while space-only compressive imaging provides only 32× compression. Additionally, under high read-noise conditions, a space-time compressive imaging system yields lower reconstruction error than a conventional imaging system due to the multiplexing advantage. We also discuss three electro-optic space-time compressive imaging architecture classes, including charge-domain processing by a smart focal plane array (FPA). Space-time compressive imaging using a smart FPA provides an alternative method to capture the nonredundant portions of time-varying scenes.