How to Design a Compact High-Throughput Video Camera?

High throughput video acquisition is a challenging problem and has been drawing increasing attention. Existing high throughput imaging systems splice hundreds of sub-images/videos into high throughput videos, suffering from extremely high system complexity. Alternatively, with pixel sizes reducing to sub-micrometer levels, integrating ultra-high throughput on a single chip is becoming feasible. Nevertheless, the readout and output transmission speed cannot keep pace with the increasing pixel numbers. To this end, this paper analyzes the strength of gradient cameras in fast readout and efficient representation, and proposes a low-bit gradient camera scheme based on existing technologies that can resolve the readout and transmission bottlenecks for high throughput video imaging. A multi-scale reconstruction CNN is proposed to reconstruct high-resolution images. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real data are conducted to demonstrate the promising quality and feasibility of the proposed method.