Super Sub-Nyquist Single-Pixel Imaging by Means of Cake-Cutting Hadamard Basis Sort

Single-pixel imaging via compressed sensing can reconstruct high-quality images from a few linear random measurements of an object known a priori to be sparse or compressive, by using a point/bucket detector without spatial resolution. Nevertheless, random measurements still have blindness, limiting the sampling ratios and leading to a harsh trade-off between the acquisition time and the spatial resolution. Here, we present a new compressive imaging approach by using a strategy we call cake-cutting, which can optimally reorder the deterministic Hadamard basis. The proposed method is capable of recovering images of large pixel-size with dramatically reduced sampling ratios, realizing super sub-Nyquist sampling and significantly decreasing the acquisition time. Furthermore, such kind of sorting strategy can be easily combined with the structured characteristic of the Hadamard matrix to accelerate the computational process and to simultaneously reduce the memory consumption of the matrix storage. With the help of differential modulation/measurement technology, we demonstrate this method with a single-photon single-pixel camera under the ulta-weak light condition and retrieve clear images through partially obscuring scenes. Thus, this method complements the present single-pixel imaging approaches and can be applied to many fields.