Rice University researchers are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the expense of traditional digital photography.

This “digital micromirror device” consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium. The light is focused through a second lens on to one single photodetector. As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession. Complex mathematics then interprets the signals assembling a high resolution image from the thousands of sequential single-pixel snapshots.