Large-area single photon compressive imaging based on multiple micro-mirrors combination imaging method

We demonstrate a single photon compressive imaging system with the image plane up to the entire digital micro-mirror device (DMD) work area. A parallel light source is designed to reduce the influence of light scattering on imaging resolution and a photon counting photomultiplier tube (PMT) with a large photosensitive area is used to effectively collect light reflected from the full screen of DMD. A control and counting circuit, based on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), is developed to load binary random matrix into the DMD controller for each measurement, and to count single-photon pulse output from PMT simultaneously. To reduce imaging time and huge memory occupation for image reconstruction, a multiple micro-minors combination imaging method is proposed. The signalto-noise ratio and detection limit of the imaging system is theoretically deduced. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that micro-mirrors combination imaging method is more suitable for faster imaging in a weaker-light-level environment. In order to achieve high imaging quality, the size of the combined pixels and the average time of each measurement should be moderate, so that the impact of Poisson shot noise is minimized. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Opal Access Publishing Agreement