High-fidelity compressed ultrafast photography with multi-shearing strategy

Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) achieves single-shot imaging with a frame rate of approximately 100 trillion frames per second and a sequence depth of hundreds of frames through compressed acquisition followed by computational reconstruction. Currently, it stands as the fastest receiver-only imaging technology, widely used in capturing various non-repeatable and hard-to-reproduce ultrafast dynamic scenes. However, due to the temporal shearing exhibited by the measured signal in only one direction, CUP suffers from inconsistent sparsity and noise levels across different directions, which severely compromises the fidelity of scene detail reconstruction. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an innovative multi-shearing CUP (MS-CUP) scheme, which supports high-fidelity recording of scenes by acquiring compressed images sheared along multiple directions and performing a joint reconstruction algorithm that fully utilizes the internal redundant information. Both numerical simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the multi-shearing strategy can significantly enhance the imaging quality of CUP compared with the single-direction shearing scheme, providing a critical means to promote the practical applications of CUP in fields that require high spatiotemporal resolution observation, such as laser physics, biomedical imaging, and industrial inspection.