Efficient full-color single-pixel imaging based on the human vision property-"giving in to the blues"

Single-pixel imaging is a novel, to the best of our knowledge, computational imaging scheme, but a large number of measurements are typically required in data acquisition. Full-color single-pixel imaging takes many more measurements than does monochromatic single-pixel imaging. Utilizing the fact that human eyes have a poorer spatial resolution to blues than reds and greens, we propose to sample the blue component of color images with an ultra-low sampling ratio so as to reduce the number of measurements. We demonstrate our method with simulations and experiments, concluding that 95% of the measurements can be reduced in the acquisition of the blue component of natural color images in the size of 256×256 pixels, and the resulting images are without remarkable visual loss. Moreover, utilizing the sparsity of natural images, the sampling ratios of the red and green components can be reduced to 15% and 50%, respectively. This Letter may generate a new insight of how to optimize the imaging efficiency by utilizing human vision properties. The proposed method can be adopted by other full-color computational imaging techniques.