Temporal Super-Resolution Using a Multi-Channel Illumination Source

Abstract

While sensing in high temporal resolution is necessary for a wide range of applications, it is still limited nowadays due to the camera sampling rate. In this work, we try to increase the temporal resolution beyond the Nyquist frequency, which is limited by the sensor’s sampling rate. This work establishes a novel approach to temporal super-resolution that uses the object-reflecting properties from an active illumination source to go beyond this limit. Following theoretical derivation and the development of signal-processing-based algorithms, we demonstrate how to increase the detected temporal spectral range by a factor of six and possibly even more. Our method is supported by simulations and experiments, and we demonstrate (via application) how we use our method to dramatically improve the accuracy of object motion estimation. We share our simulation code on GitHub.