Space- and intensity-constrained reconstruction for compressed ultrafast photography

The single-shot compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) camera is the fastest receive-only camera in the world. In this Letter, we introduce an external CCD camera and a space- and intensity-constrained (SIC) reconstruction algorithm to improve the image quality of CUP. The external CCD camera takes a time-unsheared image of the dynamic scene. Unlike the previously used unconstrained algorithm, the proposed algorithm incorporates both spatial and intensity constraints based on the additional prior information provided by the external CCD camera. First, a spatial mask is extracted from the time-unsheared image to define the zone of action. Next, an intensity threshold is determined based on the similarity between the temporally projected image of the reconstructed datacube and the time-unsheared image. Both simulation and experimental studies show that the SIC reconstruction improves the spatial resolution, contrast, and general quality of the reconstructed image.