Patent ID: 8860835

Claim:
A system comprising: a light modulation unit configured to modulate an incident stream of light with a sequence of spatial patterns in order to produce a modulated light stream, wherein the light modulation unit includes an array of light modulating elements; a plurality of light sensing devices; an optical subsystem configured to deliver light from each of a plurality of spatial subsets of the modulated light stream onto a respective one of the plurality of light sensing devices, wherein the spatial subsets of the modulated light stream are produced by respective subsets of the array of light modulating elements, wherein each subset of the array of light modulating elements produces the respective spatial subset of the modulated light stream by modulating a respective spatial subset of the incident light stream, wherein the light sensing devices are configured to generate respective electrical signals, wherein each of the electrical signals represents intensity of the respective spatial subset of the modulated light stream as a function of time; and a sampling subsystem configured to acquire samples of the electrical signals, wherein the samples include sample subsets that correspond respectively to the electrical signals, wherein each sample subset includes a plurality of samples of the respective electrical signal; wherein the sampling subsystem is configured to acquire the samples of the electrical signals in groups, wherein each of the groups includes at least one sample of each of the electrical signals, wherein each of the groups corresponds to a respective one of the spatial patterns; wherein said sampling subsystem is configured to acquire the groups of samples of the electrical signals at a maximum group rate of R G groups per unit time, wherein m SS is the number of samples in each sample subset, wherein N is the number of the light modulating elements, wherein n is less than or equal to N, wherein L is the number of the light sensing devices, wherein a number m n/L of the compressive sensing samples required to reconstruct an n/L-pixel image decreases as L increases, wherein L is selected so that m SS is greater than or equal to m n/L , and, m SS /R G is less than or equal to a target acquisition time.