Coded Acquisition of High Frame Rate Video

High frame rate video (HFV) is an important investigational tool in sciences, engineering, and military. In ultrahigh speed imaging, the obtainable temporal, spatial, and spectral resolutions are limited by the sustainable throughput of in-camera mass memory, lower bound of exposure time, and illumination conditions. To break these bottlenecks, we propose a new coded video acquisition framework that employs K ≥ 2 cameras, each of which makes random measurements of the video signal in both temporal and spatial domains. For each of the K cameras, this multicamera strategy greatly relaxes the stringent requirements in memory speed, shutter speed, and illumination strength. The recovery of HFV from these random measurements is posed and solved as a large-scale ℓ₁ minimization problem by exploiting joint temporal and spatial sparsities of the 3D signal. Three coded video acquisition techniques of varied tradeoffs between performance and hardware complexity are developed: framewise coded acquisition; pixelwise coded acquisition; and columnwise-rowwise coded acquisition. The performances of these techniques are analyzed in relation to the sparsity of the underlying video signal. Simulations of these new HFV capture techniques are carried out and experimental results are reported.