What if there was a way to collect an image with a single detector, a single pixel? It doesn’t seem possible - images consist of 2D information - how could all the information be captured with a single point measurement?

One way to do this is by scanning that point over the field-of-view, one-point at a time like a 3D Lidar map - the view of the photodector changes over a scene with a mirror scanner.

But there’s actually another way to solve this problem. And it amazingly doesn’t require any moving parts. I’ve always been fascinated by this idea, so I decided to build it - a one-pixel camera that has no moving parts. Just an LED matrix and a single photoresistor.

The full build is described here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE9AETSoPHw

https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-26-3-2427&id=381067 Zi-Hao Xu, Wen Chen, José Penuelas, Miles Padgett, and Ming-Jie Sun, "1000 fps computational ghost imaging using LED-based structured illumination," Opt. Express 26, 2427-2434 (2018)