Imaging With Nature: Compressive Imaging Using a Multiply Scattering Medium

The recent theory of compressive sensing leverages upon the structure of signals to acquire them with much fewer measurements than was previously thought necessary, and certainly well below the traditional Nyquist-Shannon sampling rate. However, most implementations developed to take advantage of this framework revolve around controlling the measurements with carefully engineered material or acquisition sequences. Instead, we use the natural randomness of wave propagation through multiply scattering media as an optimal and instantaneous compressive imaging mechanism. Waves reflected from an object are detected after propagation through a well-characterized complex medium. Each local measurement thus contains global information about the object, yielding a purely analog compressive sensing method. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for optical imaging by using a 300-micrometer thick layer of white paint as the compressive imaging device. Scattering media are thus promising candidates for designing efficient and compact compressive imagers.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Sub-Nyquist Sampling: Bridging Theory and Practice

Sampling theory encompasses all aspects related to the conversion of continuous-time signals to discrete streams of numbers. The famous Shannon-Nyquist theorem has become a landmark in the development of digital signal processing. In modern applications, an increasingly number of functions is being pushed forward to sophisticated software algorithms, leaving only those delicate finely-tuned tasks for the circuit level. In this paper, we review sampling strategies which target reduction of the ADC rate below Nyquist. Our survey covers classic works from the early 50's of the previous century through recent publications from the past several years. The prime focus is bridging theory and practice, that is to pinpoint the potential of sub-Nyquist strategies to emerge from the math to the hardware. In that spirit, we integrate contemporary theoretical viewpoints, which study signal modeling in a union of subspaces, together with a taste of practical aspects, namely how the avant-garde modalities boil down to concrete signal processing systems. Our hope is that this presentation style will attract the interest of both researchers and engineers in the hope of promoting the sub-Nyquist premise into practical applications, and encouraging further research into this exciting new frontier.Comment: 48 pages, 18 figures, to appear in IEEE Signal Processing Magazin

From Theory to Practice: Sub-Nyquist Sampling of Sparse Wideband Analog Signals

Conventional sub-Nyquist sampling methods for analog signals exploit prior information about the spectral support. In this paper, we consider the challenging problem of blind sub-Nyquist sampling of multiband signals, whose unknown frequency support occupies only a small portion of a wide spectrum. Our primary design goals are efficient hardware implementation and low computational load on the supporting digital processing. We propose a system, named the modulated wideband converter, which first multiplies the analog signal by a bank of periodic waveforms. The product is then lowpass filtered and sampled uniformly at a low rate, which is orders of magnitude smaller than Nyquist. Perfect recovery from the proposed samples is achieved under certain necessary and sufficient conditions. We also develop a digital architecture, which allows either reconstruction of the analog input, or processing of any band of interest at a low rate, that is, without interpolating to the high Nyquist rate. Numerical simulations demonstrate many engineering aspects: robustness to noise and mismodeling, potential hardware simplifications, realtime performance for signals with time-varying support and stability to quantization effects. We compare our system with two previous approaches: periodic nonuniform sampling, which is bandwidth limited by existing hardware devices, and the random demodulator, which is restricted to discrete multitone signals and has a high computational load. In the broader context of Nyquist sampling, our scheme has the potential to break through the bandwidth barrier of state-of-the-art analog conversion technologies such as interleaved converters.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, to appear in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, the special issue on Compressed Sensin

An Introduction To Compressive Sampling [A sensing/sampling paradigm that goes against the common knowledge in data acquisition]

This article surveys the theory of compressive sampling, also known as compressed sensing or CS, a novel sensing/sampling paradigm that goes against the common wisdom in data acquisition. CS theory asserts that one can recover certain signals and images from far fewer samples or measurements than traditional methods use. To make this possible, CS relies on two principles: sparsity, which pertains to the signals of interest, and incoherence, which pertains to the sensing modality. Our intent in this article is to overview the basic CS theory that emerged in the works [1]–[3], present the key mathematical ideas underlying this theory, and survey a couple of important results in the field. Our goal is to explain CS as plainly as possible, and so our article is mainly of a tutorial nature. One of the charms of this theory is that it draws from various subdisciplines within the applied mathematical sciences, most notably probability theory. In this review, we have decided to highlight this aspect and especially the fact that randomness can — perhaps surprisingly — lead to very effective sensing mechanisms. We will also discuss significant implications, explain why CS is a concrete protocol for sensing and compressing data simultaneously (thus the name), and conclude our tour by reviewing important applications

Model-Based Calibration of Filter Imperfections in the Random Demodulator for Compressive Sensing

The random demodulator is a recent compressive sensing architecture providing efficient sub-Nyquist sampling of sparse band-limited signals. The compressive sensing paradigm requires an accurate model of the analog front-end to enable correct signal reconstruction in the digital domain. In practice, hardware devices such as filters deviate from their desired design behavior due to component variations. Existing reconstruction algorithms are sensitive to such deviations, which fall into the more general category of measurement matrix perturbations. This paper proposes a model-based technique that aims to calibrate filter model mismatches to facilitate improved signal reconstruction quality. The mismatch is considered to be an additive error in the discretized impulse response. We identify the error by sampling a known calibrating signal, enabling least-squares estimation of the impulse response error. The error estimate and the known system model are used to calibrate the measurement matrix. Numerical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the calibration method even for highly deviating low-pass filter responses. The proposed method performance is also compared to a state of the art method based on discrete Fourier transform trigonometric interpolation.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Xampling: Signal Acquisition and Processing in Union of Subspaces

We introduce Xampling, a unified framework for signal acquisition and processing of signals in a union of subspaces. The main functions of this framework are two. Analog compression that narrows down the input bandwidth prior to sampling with commercial devices. A nonlinear algorithm then detects the input subspace prior to conventional signal processing. A representative union model of spectrally-sparse signals serves as a test-case to study these Xampling functions. We adopt three metrics for the choice of analog compression: robustness to model mismatch, required hardware accuracy and software complexities. We conduct a comprehensive comparison between two sub-Nyquist acquisition strategies for spectrally-sparse signals, the random demodulator and the modulated wideband converter (MWC), in terms of these metrics and draw operative conclusions regarding the choice of analog compression. We then address lowrate signal processing and develop an algorithm for that purpose that enables convenient signal processing at sub-Nyquist rates from samples obtained by the MWC. We conclude by showing that a variety of other sampling approaches for different union classes fit nicely into our framework.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, submitted to IEEE for possible publicatio