Single-pixel imaging which employs active illumination to acquire spatial information is an innovative imaging scheme and has received increasing attentions in recent years. It is applicable to imaging at non-visible wavelengths and imaging under low light conditions. However, single-pixel imaging has once encountered problems of low reconstruction quality and long data-acquisition time. Hadamard single-pixel imaging (HSI) and Fourier single-pixel imaging (FSI) are two representative deterministic model based techniques. Both techniques are able to achieve high-quality and efficient imaging, remarkably improving the applicability of single-pixel imaging scheme. In this paper, we compare the performances of HSI and FSI with theoretical analysis and experiments. The results show that FSI is more efficient than HSI while HSI is more noise-robust than FSI. Our work may provide a guideline for researchers to choose suitable single-pixel imaging technique for their applications.

Fourier single-pixel imaging (FSI) employs Fourier basis patterns for encoding spatial information and is capable of reconstructing high-quality two-dimensional and three-dimensional images. Fourier-domain sparsity in natural scenes allows FSI to recover sharp images from undersampled data. The original FSI demonstration, however, requires grayscale Fourier basis patterns for illumination. This requirement imposes a limitation on the imaging speed as digital micro-mirror devices (DMDs) generate grayscale patterns at a low refreshing rate. In this paper, we report a new strategy to increase the speed of FSI by two orders of magnitude. In this strategy, we binarize the Fourier basis patterns based on upsampling and error diffusion dithering. We demonstrate a 20,000 Hz projection rate using a DMD and capture 256-by-256-pixel dynamic scenes at a speed of 10 frames per second. The reported technique substantially accelerates image acquisition speed of FSI. It may find broad imaging applications at wavebands that are not accessible using conventional two-dimensional image sensors.

Single-pixel imaging can capture images using a detector without spatial resolution, which enables imaging in various situations that are challenging or impossible with conventional pixelated detectors. Here we report a compressive single-pixel imaging approach that can simultaneously encode and recover spatial, spectral, and 3D information of the object. In this approach, we modulate and condense the object information in the Fourier space and detect the light signals using a single-pixel detector. The data-compressing operation is similar to conventional compression algorithms that selectively store the largest coefficients of a transform domain. In our implementation, we selectively sample the largest Fourier coefficients, and no iterative optimization process is needed in the recovery process. We demonstrate an 88% compression ratio for producing a high-quality full-color 3D image. The reported approach provides a solution for information multiplexing in single-pixel imaging settings. It may also generate new insights for developing multi-modality computational imaging systems.

We present an analysis of a spatial carrier-fringe pattern in three-dimensional (3-D) shape measurement by using the wavelet transform, a tool excelling for its multiresolution in the time- and space-frequency domains. To overcome the limitation of the Fourier transform, we introduce the Gabor wavelet to analyze the phase distributions of the spatial carrier-fringe pattern. The theory of wavelet transform profilometry, an accuracy check by means of a simulation, and an example of 3-D shape measurement are shown.

A new method for phase retrieval of optical fringe patterns is presented. This method is based on a wavelet transform and is capable of extracting the full 2D phase distribution from a single fringe pattern. An important conclusion that the phase of the optical fringe pattern is equal to the phase of its wavelet transform on the ridge of the wavelet transform is theoretically clarified. The method is compared with the Fourier transform and the integration methods. A numerical simulation and an experimental example of phase retrieval are shown.

Typical single-pixel imaging techniques inherently consume a large number of measurements to reconstruct a high-quality and high-resolution image. Three-dimensional (3-D) single-pixel imaging with both high sampling efficiency and high depth accuracy remains a challenge. We implement fringe projection virtually by exploiting Helmholtz reciprocity. Depth information is modulated into a deformed fringe pattern whose Fourier spectrum is sampled by using sinusoidal intensity pattern illumination and single-pixel detection. The fringe pattern has a highly focused first-order component in its Fourier spectrum, which allows us to efficiently acquire the depth information from measurements far fewer than illumination pattern pixels. The 3-D information is retrieved through Fourier analysis. We experimentally obtained a 3-D reconstruction of a complex object with $599\times 599$ effective pixels, achieving a measurement-to-pixel ratio of 5.78%. The depth accuracy is evaluated at sub-millimetric level by using a test object.