Improving the signal-to-noise ratio of single-pixel imaging using digital microscanning

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 24; no. 10; p. 10476
• Main Authors: Sun, Ming-Jie, Edgar, Matthew P., Phillips, David B., Gibson, Graham M., Padgett, Miles J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 16.05.2016
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.24.010476

Single-pixel cameras provide a means to perform imaging at wavelengths where pixelated detector arrays are expensive or limited. The image is reconstructed from measurements of the correlation between the scene and a series of masks. Although there has been much research in the field in recent years, the fact that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scales poorly with increasing resolution has been one of the main limitations prohibiting the uptake of such systems. Microscanning is a technique that provides a final higher resolution image by combining multiple images of a lower resolution. Each of these low resolution images is subject to a sub-pixel sized lateral displacement. In this work we apply a digital microscanning approach to an infrared single-pixel camera. Our approach requires no additional hardware, but is achieved simply by using a modified set of masks. Compared to the conventional Hadamard based single-pixel imaging scheme, our proposed framework improves the SNR of reconstructed images by ∼ 50 % for the same acquisition time. In addition, this strategy also provides access to a stream of low-resolution 'preview' images throughout each high-resolution acquisition.