SpinCam: High-Speed Imaging via a Rotating Point-Spread Function

High-speed cameras are an indispensable tool used for the slow-motion analysis of scenes. However, the fixed bandwidth of any imaging system quickly becomes a bottleneck, resulting in a fundamental trade-off between the camera’s spatial and temporal resolutions. In recent years, compressive high-speed imaging systems have been proposed to circumvent these issues by optically encoding the signal and using a reconstruction procedure to recover a video. Our work proposes a novel approach for compressive high-speed imaging based on temporally coding the camera’s point-spread function (PSF). By mechanically spinning a diffraction grating in front of a camera, the sensor integrates an image blurred by a PSF that continuously rotates over time. We also propose a deconvolution-based reconstruction algorithm to reconstruct videos from these measurements. Our method achieves superior light efficiency and handles a wider scene class than prior methods. Also, our mechanical design yields flexible temporal resolution that can be easily increased, potentially allowing capture at 192 kHz—far higher than prior works. We demonstrate a prototype for various applications, including motion capture and particle image velocimetry (PIV).