Photonics-assisted compressed sensing of radio frequencies with a rate-doubled bipolar random sequence

A novel, to the best of our knowledge, photonics-assisted scheme for compressed sensing (CS) of sparse RF signals is proposed. An architecture with time-delayed dual-channel modulation of a pseudo-random binary sequence in combination with differential detection enables the generation of a rate-doubled bipolar random sequence, which largely increases the bandwidth of the CS system. In addition, the bipolarity of the random sequence ensures a zero-mean measurement matrix, which helps improve the signal recovery performance. Experimental results are presented to verify the performance improvement of the approach in comparison with the conventional single-ended photonic CS system.