Increasing imaging resolution by covering your sensor

Up to now, an increase in camera resolution required image sensors with more and more pixels. However, acquisition systems are limited in their pixels per second throughput given as power and complexity constraints. Simply capturing more pixels in a given system is often not possible. We propose a new non-regular imaging architecture that samples only few pixels and reconstructs a high resolution image afterwards. Our sampling is optimized to provide non-regular spatial sampling from a sensor with regular readout circuits. An existing slow image acquisition system can then be used to capture the data. The image reconstruction is performed with a local sparsity-based approach. The result is a high resolution image that requires a much smaller effort during acquisition.