Capturing ultrafast transient phenomena conventionally requires streak cameras or computational imaging based on compressed sensing, which lead to complex and costly systems. In this Letter, we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully passive single-shot ultrafast imaging architecture assembled entirely from off-the-shelf, low-cost components. A commercial microlens array combined with a stack of standard microscope cover glasses maps temporal information into multiple spatial channels, and a consumer-grade CMOS image sensor records all delayed replicas within a single camera exposure. The proposed system has a total hardware cost below US$500 and captures the evolution of a picosecond laser pulse with a temporal sampling interval of 1.46 ps, an effective frame rate of 685 Gfps, and a sequence depth of ten frames. The temporal fidelity of the system is verified by recovering the expected Gaussian pulse profile, and the spatial resolution is characterized through a point-source measurement with a point spread function of 1.86 and 1.62 pixels full width at half maximum along the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. The proposed architecture presents an alternative approach to single-shot ultrafast imaging with a simple, low-cost, computation-free, and fully passive design.
Schematic of the proposed low-cost passive spatially multiplexed ultrafast imaging system. A microlens array generates replicated image channels, each of which experiences a different optical delay introduced by a stack of standard microscope cover glasses. Temporally delayed replicas are simultaneously recorded within a single camera exposure using a consumer-grade CMOS sensor.
Single-shot reconstruction of the temporal evolution of a picosecond laser pulse. Each sub-image corresponds to a different optical delay introduced by the proposed spatial multiplexing architecture. The sequence is recovered from a single camera exposure with a temporal spacing of 1.46 ps between the frames.
Normalized total intensity extracted from reconstructed frames as a function of relative temporal delay. The measured temporal profile follows a Gaussian distribution (dashed curve), which confirms the accurate preservation of the pulse dynamics.