High-frequency enhanced ultrafast compressed active photography

Single-shot ultrafast compressed imaging (UCI) is an effective tool for studying ultrafast dynamics in physics, chemistry, or material science because of its excellent high frame rate and large frame number. However, the random code (R-code) used in traditional UCI will lead to low-frequency noise covering high-frequency information due to its uneven sampling interval, which is a great challenge in the fidelity of large-frame reconstruction. Here, a high-frequency enhanced compressed active photography (H-CAP) is proposed. By uniformizing the sampling interval of R-code, H-CAP capture the ultrafast process with a random uniform sampling mode. This sampling mode makes the high-frequency sampling energy dominant, which greatly suppresses the low-frequency noise blurring caused by R-code and achieves high-frequency information of image enhanced. The superior dynamic performance and large-frame reconstruction ability of H-CAP are verified by imaging optical self-focusing effect and static object, respectively. We applied H-CAP to the spatial-temporal characterization of double-pulse induced silicon surface ablation dynamics, which is performed within 220 frames in a single-shot of 300 ps. H-CAP provides a high-fidelity imaging method for observing ultrafast unrepeatable dynamic processes with large frames.