NOISE ANALYSIS FOR LENSLESS COMPRESSIVE IMAGING

We analyze the signal to noise ratio in a recently proposed lensless compressive imaging architecture. The architecture consists of a sensor of a single detector element and an aperture assembly of an array of aperture elements, each of which has a programmable transmittance. This lensless, single detector, programmable aperture imaging architecture has a number of advantages, and in particular, it can be used in conjunction with compressive sensing to capture images in a compressed form of compressive measurements. In this paper, we perform noise analysis of this lensless compressive imaging architecture and compare it with imaging from a pinhole or a lens. We will show that the signal to noise ratio (SNR) in the lensless compressive imaging is independent of the image resolution, while that in either pinhole aperture imaging or lens aperture imaging decreases as the image resolution increases. Consequently, the SNR in the lensless compressive imaging may be higher when image resolution is large enough.