High dynamic range compressive imaging: a programmable imaging system

Abstract

Some scenes and objects have a wide range of brightness that cannot be captured with a conventional camera. This limitation, which degrades the dynamic range of an imaged scene or object, is addressed by use of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging techniques. With HDR imaging techniques, images of a very broad range of intensity can be obtained with conventional cameras. Another limitation of conventional cameras is the range of wavelength that they can capture. Outside the visible wavelengths, the responsivity of conventional cameras drops; therefore, a conventional camera cannot capture images in nonvisible wavelengths. Compressive imaging is a solution for this problem. Compressive imaging reduces the number of pixels of a camera to one, so a camera can be replaced by a detector with one pixel. The range of wavelengths to which such detectors are responsive is much wider than that of a conventional camera. A combination of HDR imaging and compressive imaging is introduced and is benefit