Query: Single-shot compressed ultrafast photography at one hundred billion frames per second

Candidate papers:

abstract: The capture of transient scenes at high imaging speed has been long sought by photographers, with early examples being the well known recording in 1878 of a horse in motion and the 1887 photograph of a supersonic bullet. However, not until the late twentieth century were breakthroughs achieved in demonstrating ultrahigh speed imaging (more than 105 frames per second) In particular, the introduction of electronic imaging sensors based on the charge coupled device (CCD) or complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology revolutionized high speed photography, enabling acquisition rates of up to 107 frames per second. Despite these sensors' widespread impact, further increasing frame rates using CCD or CMOS technology is fundamentally limited by their on chip storage and electronic readout speed. Here we demonstrate a two dimensional dynamic imaging technique, compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) which can capture non repetitive time evolving events at up to 1011 frames per second. Compared with existing ultrafast imaging techniques, CUP has the prominent advantage of measuring an x y t (x, y, spatial coordinates; t, time) scene with a single camera snapshot, thereby allowing observation of transient events with temporal resolution as tens of picoseconds. Furthermore, akin to traditional photography, CUP is receive only, and so does not need the specialized active illumination required by other single shot ultrafast imagers. As a result, CUP can image a variety of luminescent such as fluorescent or bioluminescent objects. Using CUP, we visualize four fundamental physical phenomena with single laser shots only: laser pulse reflection and refraction, photon racing in two media, and faster than light propagation of non information (that is, motion that appears faster than the speed of light but cannot convey information) Given CUP's capability, we expect it to find widespread applications in both fundamental and applied sciences, including biomedical research.
author_names: Liang Gao

Jinyang Liang

Chiye Li

Lihong V Wang
title: Single shot compressed ultrafast photography at one hundred billion frames per second
venue: Nature
year: 2014

abstract: Abstract. Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is a burgeoning single shot computational imaging technique that provides an imaging speed as high as 10 trillion frames per second and a sequence depth of up to a few hundred frames. This technique synergizes compressed sensing and the streak camera technique to capture nonrepeatable ultrafast transient events with a single shot. With recent unprecedented technical developments and extensions of this methodology, it has been widely used in ultrafast optical imaging and metrology, ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy, and information security protection. We review the basic principles of CUP, its recent advances in data acquisition and image reconstruction, its fusions with other modalities, and its unique applications in multiple research fields.
author_names: Dalong Qi

Shian Zhang

Chengshuai Yang

Yilin He

Fengyan Cao

Jiali Yao

Pengpeng Ding

Liang Gao

Tianqing Jia

Jinyang Liang

Zhenrong Sun

Lihong V Wang
title: Single shot compressed ultrafast photography: a review
year: 2020

abstract: Simultaneous and efficient ultrafast recording of multiple photon tags contributes to high dimensional optical imaging and characterization in numerous fields. Existing high dimensional optical imaging techniques that record space and polarization cannot detect the photon's time of arrival owing to the limited speeds of the state of the art electronic sensors. Here, we overcome this long standing limitation by implementing stereo polarimetric compressed ultrafast photography (SP CUP) to record light speed high dimensional events in a single exposure. Synergizing compressed sensing and streak imaging with stereoscopy and polarimetry, SP CUP enables video recording of five photon tags (x, y, z: space; t: time of arrival; and ps: angle of linear polarization) at 100 billion frames per second with a picosecond temporal resolution. We applied SP CUP to the spatiotemporal characterization of linear polarization dynamics in early stage plasma emission from laser induced breakdown. This system also allowed three dimensional ultrafast imaging of the linear polarization properties of a single ultrashort laser pulse propagating in a scattering medium.
author_names: Jinyang Liang

Pingshan Wang

Liren Zhu

Lihong V Wang
title: Single shot stereo polarimetric compressed ultrafast photography for light speed observation of high dimensional optical transients with picosecond resolution
venue: Nature communications
year: 2020

abstract: We present single shot real time video recording of light scattering dynamics by second generation compressed ultrafast photography (G2 CUP) Using G2 CUP at 100 billion frames per second, in a single camera exposure, we experimentally captured the evolution of the light intensity distribution in an engineered thin scattering plate assembly. G2 CUP, which implements a new reconstruction paradigm and a more efficient hardware design than its predecessors, markedly improves the reconstructed image quality. The ultrafast imaging reveals the instantaneous light scattering pattern as a photonic Mach cone. We envision that our technology will find a diverse range of applications in biomedical imaging, materials science, and physics.
author_names: Jinyang Liang

Cheng Ma

Liren Zhu

Yujia Chen

Liang Gao

Lihong V Wang
title: Ultrafast imaging of light scattering dynamics using second generation compressed ultrafast photography
venue: BiOS
year: 2017

abstract: Fluorescent lifetime imaging is an optical technique that facilitates imaging molecular interactions and cellular functions. Because the excited lifetime of a fluorophore is sensitive to its local microenvironment,1, 2 measurement of fluorescent lifetimes can be used to accurately detect regional changes in temperature, pH, and ion concentration. However, typical state of the art fluorescent lifetime methods are severely limited when it comes to acquisition time (on the order of seconds to minutes) and video rate imaging. Here we show that compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) can be used in conjunction with fluorescent lifetime imaging to overcome these acquisition rate limitations. Frame rates up to one hundred billion frames per second have been demonstrated with compressed ultrafast photography using a streak camera.3 These rates are achieved by encoding time in the spatial direction with a pseudo random binary pattern. The time domain information is then reconstructed using a compressed sensing algorithm, resulting in a cube of data (x,y,t) for each readout image. Thus, application of compressed ultrafast photography will allow us to acquire an entire fluorescent lifetime image with a single laser pulse. Using a streak camera with a high speed CMOS camera, acquisition rates of 100 frames per second can be achieved, which will significantly enhance our ability to quantitatively measure complex biological events with high spatial and temporal resolution. In particular, we will demonstrate the ability of this technique to do single shot fluorescent lifetime imaging of cells and microspheres.
author_names: Jonathan V Thompson

John David Mason

Hope T Beier

Joel N Bixler
title: High speed fluorescence imaging with compressed ultrafast photography
venue: BiOS
year: 2017

abstract: We have developed lossless compressed ultrafast photography (LLE CUP) a single shot receive only ultrafast imaging modality with an imaging speed of 100 billion frames per second. Using LLE CUP, we have imaged, for the first time, a scattering induced propagating photonic Mach cone in real time.
author_names: Jinyang Liang
title: Lossless encoding compressed ultrafast photography: Capturing light speed scattering dynamics in a snapshot
venue: 2017 Photonics North (PN)
year: 2017

abstract: Lossless encoding compressed ultrafast photography captures a movie of a photonic Mach cone at 100 billion frames per second. Ultrafast video recording of spatiotemporal light distribution in a scattering medium has a significant impact in biomedicine. Although many simulation tools have been implemented to model light propagation in scattering media, existing experimental instruments still lack sufficient imaging speed to record transient light scattering events in real time. We report single shot ultrafast video recording of a light induced photonic Mach cone propagating in an engineered scattering plate assembly. This dynamic light scattering event was captured in a single camera exposure by lossless encoding compressed ultrafast photography at 100 billion frames per second. Our experimental results are in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions by time resolved Monte Carlo simulation. This technology holds great promise for next generation biomedical imaging instrumentation.
author_names: Jinyang Liang

Cheng Ma

Liren Zhu

Yujia Chen

Liang Gao

Lihong V Wang
title: Single shot real time video recording of a photonic Mach cone induced by a scattered light pulse
venue: Science Advances
year: 2017

abstract: Video recording of ultrafast phenomena using a detector array based on the CCD or CMOS technologies is fundamentally limited by the sensor's on chip storage and data transfer speed. To get around this problem, the most practical approach is to utilize a streak camera. However, the resultant image is normally one dimensional only a line of the scene can be seen at a time. Acquiring a two dimensional image thus requires mechanical scanning across the entire field of view. This requirement poses severe restrictions on the applicable scenes because the event itself must be repetitive. To overcome these limitations, we have developed a new computational ultrafast imaging method, referred to as compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) which can capture two dimensional dynamic scenes at up to 100 billion frames per second. Based on the concept of compressed sensing, CUP works by encoding the input scene with a random binary pattern in the spatial domain, followed by shearing the resultant image in a streak camera with a fully opened entrance slit. The image reconstruction is the solution of the inverse problem of above processes. Given sparsity in the spatiotemporal domain, the original event datacube can be reasonably estimated by employing a two step iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm. To demonstrate CUP, we imaged light reflection, refraction, and racing in two different media (air and resin) Our technique, for the first time, enables video recording of photon propagation at a temporal resolution down to tens of picoseconds. Moreover, to further expand CUP's functionality, we added a color separation unit to the system, thereby allowing simultaneous acquisition of a four dimensional datacube (x,y,t,l) where l is wavelength, within a single camera snapshot.
author_names: Liang Gao
title: Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) redefining the limit of passive ultrafast imaging (Conference Presentation)
venue: SPIE BiOS
year: 2016

abstract: An imaging technique has been developed that can record non repetitive ultrafast phenomena without strobe or flash illumination. The approach could find applications in biomedicine and security technologies. See Letter p.74 With the advent of fast electronic imaging sensors in the late 1960s, ultrafast photography became possible. Events even faster than a nanosecond can be captured with a streak camera a device that records a single extended frame rather than a sequence of frames. However, this technique is inherently one dimensional: to capture a two dimensional image, the camera needs to scan the scene stepwise, requiring the event to be repetitive. Gao et al. now demonstrate a technique based on compressed imaging with a streak camera that can video record non repetitive transient events in two dimensions at 100 billion frames per second, a temporal resolution down to tens of picoseconds. To demonstrate the potential of the technique, dubbed compressed ultrafast photography or CUP, the authors demonstrate ultra fast imaging of laser pulses being reflected and refracted, and of photons racing in two media, as well as apparent faster than light propagation of non information. It should be possible to couple CUP to anything from microscopes to telescopes.
author_names: Brian W Pogue
title: Technology: Ultrafast imaging takes on a new design
venue: Nature
year: 2014

abstract: In established theory; two dimensional imaging using a streak camera is not possible due to restrictions on traditional streak camera design such as entrance slit limitations. Efforts to develop and use streak cameras for two dimensional high speed imaging have been ongoing for the past several decades. In 1990, a framing camera using a modified streak tube was developed by Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. Japan, which could capture 3 million frames per second but at only 8 frames per shot. Another early development was Shiraga et al.'s two dimensional X ray imager that was capable of 10 ps time resolution and used a multi pinhole photocathode surface [1] Since then, the technology for high speed photography using streak cameras have evolved step by step. However, recent advances have resulted in superior performance. In 2014, Gao et al. developed a single shot compressed ultrafast photography with 100 billion frames/sec [2] In 2012, Velten et al. successfully developed the one trillion frame per second video camera [3] [4] or so called femto photography, that uses a sampling method. In this paper, we describe the principles and applications of streak tubes for high speed, two dimensional imaging.
author_names: Koji Uchiyama

Barbara Cieslik

Tao Ai

Fuminori Niikura

Shunichi Abe
title: Various ultra high speed imaging and applications by Streak camera
year: 2016