Sparse Transformer for Ultra-sparse Sampled Video Compressive Sensing

Digital cameras consume ~0.1 microjoule per pixel to capture and encode video, resulting in a power usage of ~20W for a 4K sensor operating at 30 fps. Imagining gigapixel cameras operating at 100-1000 fps, the current processing model is unsustainable. To address this, physical layer compressive measurement has been proposed to reduce power consumption per pixel by 10-100X. Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI) introduces high frequency modulation in the optical sensor layer to increase effective frame rate. A commonly used sampling strategy of video SCI is Random Sampling (RS) where each mask element value is randomly set to be 0 or 1. Similarly, image inpainting (I2P) has demonstrated that images can be recovered from a fraction of the image pixels. Inspired by I2P, we propose Ultra-Sparse Sampling (USS) regime, where at each spatial location, only one sub-frame is set to 1 and all others are set to 0. We then build a Digital Micro-mirror Device (DMD) encoding system to verify the effectiveness of our USS strategy. Ideally, we can decompose the USS measurement into sub-measurements for which we can utilize I2P algorithms to recover high-speed frames. However, due to the mismatch between the DMD and CCD, the USS measurement cannot be perfectly decomposed. To this end, we propose BSTFormer, a sparse TransFormer that utilizes local Block attention, global Sparse attention, and global Temporal attention to exploit the sparsity of the USS measurement. Extensive results on both simulated and real-world data show that our method significantly outperforms all previous state-of-the-art algorithms. Additionally, an essential advantage of the USS strategy is its higher dynamic range than that of the RS strategy. Finally, from the application perspective, the USS strategy is a good choice to implement a complete video SCI system on chip due to its fixed exposure time.

Integrated Photonic Encoder for Terapixel Image Processing

Modern lens designs are capable of resolving >10 gigapixels, while advances in camera frame-rate and hyperspectral imaging have made Terapixel/s data acquisition a real possibility. The main bottlenecks preventing such high data-rate systems are power consumption and data storage. In this work, we show that analog photonic encoders could address this challenge, enabling high-speed image compression using orders-of-magnitude lower power than digital electronics. Our approach relies on a silicon-photonics front-end to compress raw image data, foregoing energy-intensive image conditioning and reducing data storage requirements. The compression scheme uses a passive disordered photonic structure to perform kernel-type random projections of the raw image data with minimal power consumption and low latency. A back-end neural network can then reconstruct the original images with structural similarity exceeding 90%. This scheme has the potential to process Terapixel/s data streams using less than 100 fJ/pixel, providing a path to ultra-high-resolution data and image acquisition systems.

Compressive Hyperspectral Imaging with Side Information

A blind compressive sensing algorithm is proposed to reconstruct hyperspectral images from spectrally-compressed measurements.The wavelength-dependent data are coded and then superposed, mapping the three-dimensional hyperspectral datacube to a two-dimensional image. The inversion algorithm learns a dictionary {\em in situ} from the measurements via global-local shrinkage priors. By using RGB images as side information of the compressive sensing system, the proposed approach is extended to learn a coupled dictionary from the joint dataset of the compressed measurements and the corresponding RGB images, to improve reconstruction quality. A prototype camera is built using a liquid-crystal-on-silicon modulator. Experimental reconstructions of hyperspectral datacubes from both simulated and real compressed measurements demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed inversion algorithm, the feasibility of the camera and the benefit of side information.