Recently I have been reading a lot about Compressive Sensing strategies. One of the things we always want when we work in a single-pixel architecture is to project the lowest possible number of masks, because the projecting process is the longest in all the acquisition procedure (and it gets longer and longer when you increase the spatial resolution of your images).

In the past, several strategies haven been implemented to reduce that number of projections. From going fully random to partially scan a basis at random and at the low frequency region, each approach presents some benefits and more or less speed gain.

In this work by the group of K.F. Kelly, they explored a different approach. Instead of chosing one measurement basis and design a sensing strategy (picking random elements, or centering around the low frequency part of the basis, or a mix), they create a measurement basis by merging different functions. They call it hybrid patterns. The basic idea is to chose a low number of patterns which work well for recovering low frequency content of natural images, and also some other patterns which are good to recover high frequency content. The novel thing here is that they do not require the patterns to belong to the same orthogonal basis, thus being able to carefully design its measurement basis. This provides very good quality results with a low number of projections.

Another thing I liked a lot was the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) part of the paper. Basically, they gathered a collection of natural images and they generated an orthogonal basis by using PCA. This leads me to think of PCA as a way of obtaining orthogonal bases where objects have their sparsest representation (maybe I am wrong about that).

Realization of hybrid compressive imaging strategies,

Y.Li et al, at Journal of the Optical Society of America A

(featured image exctracted from Fig.2 of the manuscript)

Abstract:

The tendency of natural scenes to cluster around low frequencies is not only useful in image compression, it also can prove advantageous in novel infrared and hyperspectral image acquisition. In this paper, we exploit this signal model with two approaches to enhance the quality of compressive imaging as implemented in a single-pixel compressive camera and compare these results against purely random acquisition. We combine projection patterns that can efficiently extract the model-based information with subsequent random projections to form the hybrid pattern sets. With the first approach, we generate low-frequency patterns via a direct transform. As an alternative, we also used principal component analysis of an image library to identify the low-frequency components. We present the first (to the best of our knowledge) experimental validation of this hybrid signal model on real data. For both methods, we acquire comparable quality of reconstructions while acquiring only half the number of measurements needed by traditional random sequences. The optimal combination of hybrid patterns and the effects of noise on image reconstruction are also discussed.