Patent ID: 7427932

Claim:
A method for compressively sampling an optical signal using an imaging system, comprising: creating the imaging system from a plurality of subimaging systems, wherein each subimaging system comprises a subaperture and a plurality of sensors; collecting the optical signal at each subaperture of the plurality of subimaging systems at a single time step; transforming the optical signal into a subimage at each subimaging system of the plurality of subimaging systems, wherein the subimage comprises at least one measurement from a plurality of sensors of the each subimaging system, and calculating an image of the optical signal from a sampling function and each subimage, spatial location, pixel sampling function, and point spread function of each subimaging system of the plurality of subimaging systems, wherein the sampling function is selected so that the number of measurements from a plurality of subimages is less than a number of estimated optical signal values comprising the image.