Compressive Coded Rotating Mirror Camera for High-Speed Imaging

Abstract

We develop a novel compressive coded rotating mirror (CCRM) camera to capture events at high frame rates in passive mode with a compact instrument design at a fraction of the cost compared to other high-speed imaging cameras. Operation of the CCRM camera is based on amplitude optical encoding (grey scale) and a continuous frame sweep across a low-cost detector using a motorized rotating mirror system which can achieve single pixel shift between adjacent frames. Amplitude encoding and continuous frame overlapping enable the CCRM camera to achieve a high number of captured frames and high temporal resolution without making sacrifices in the spatial resolution. Two sets of dynamic scenes have been captured at up to a 120 Kfps frame rate in both monochrome and colored scales in the experimental demonstrations. The obtained heavily compressed data from the experiment are reconstructed using the optimization algorithm under the compressive sensing (CS) paradigm and the highest sequence depth of 1400 captured frames in a single exposure has been achieved with the highest compression ratio of 368 compared to other CS-based high-speed imaging technologies. Under similar conditions the CCRM camera is 700× faster than conventional rotating mirror based imaging devices and could reach a frame rate of up to 20 Gfps.