Humans are visual animals, and imaging sensors that extend our reachcameras-have improved dramatically in recent times thanks to the introduction of CCD and CMOS digital technology. Consumer digital cameras in the megapixel range are now ubiquitous thanks to the happy coincidence that the semiconductor material of choice for large-scale electronics integration (silicon) also happens to readily convert photons at visual wavelengths into electrons. On the contrary, imaging at wavelengths where silicon is blind is considerably more complicated, bulky, and expensive. Thus, for comparable resolution, a US$500 digital camera for the visible becomes a US$50,000 camera for the infrared.In this article, we present a new approach to building simpler, smaller, and cheaper digital cameras that can operate efficiently across a much broader spectral range than conventional silicon-based cameras. Our approach fuses a new camera architecture
A new sum frequency generation imaging microscope using a novel sampling theory, compressive sensing (CS), has been developed for surface studies. CS differentiates itself from the conventional sampling methods by collecting fewer measurements than the traditional methods to reconstruct a high quality image. Pseudorandom patterns were applied to a light modulator and reflected the sum frequency (SF) signal generated from the sample into a photomultiplier tube detector. The image of the sample was reconstructed using sparsity preserving algorithms from the SF signal. The influences of the number of CS testing patterns applied and the number of SF pulses acquired for each pattern on the quality of the images was investigated and a comparison of the image quality with the traditional raster scan was made at varying resolutions for a gold patterned Si surface. Our results demonstrate the CS technique achieved 16 times the pixel density beyond the resolution where the raster scan strategy lost its ability to image the sample due to the dilution of the SF signal below the detection limit of the detector.
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