Photographing by a single-pixel camera

As an option to photographic techniques that use sensors with millions of pixels, it is possible to use a camera with only one pixel to record images. For this, it is necessary to illuminate a scene using spatially modulated light and measure the intensity of the scattering with a single-pixel sensor. This article presents how a digital image is generated using a low-cost system to assemble a single-pixel camera. The technique consists of obtaining an image in the Fourier domain to convert it into the spatial domain using a fast Fourier transform algorithm. The proposed experiment can be conducted by undergraduates in advanced experimental physics courses. The results show that scene recognition starts at 20% of the total number of measurements, demonstrating its potential applications for compressed sensing imaging systems.

Keywords
Single-pixel camera; ghost imaging; two-dimensional Fourier transform; imaging