Single-pixel sensing encodes a scene as a short sequence of coded measurements, and image-free methods infer the task directly from that sequence. We show that removing image reconstruction relocates the central design problem to the lift: how 1D measurements become a 2D task representation. We organize this choice as a lift spectrum from a fixed-physics inverse, through a learned static projection, to content-adaptive retrieval. These are not interchangeable forms of reconstruction: the fixed-physics route reconstructs an image consumed at inference, whereas our spatiotemporal soft-fusion (STSF) network lifts measurements directly into task features, and task-prioritized loss scheduling (TPLS) uses a separate learned reconstruction branch only as scheduled training supervision. A probe-selected recurrent encoder and a parameter-matched lift ablation identify the STSF design. In simulation, STSF+TPLS exceeds the prior image-free baseline on three datasets at 3.13% sampling (+3.2 to +9.9 pp foreground mIoU) and remains competitive down to 0.39%. The strongest clean-trained reconstruct-then-segment baseline wins without measurement noise, but measurement noise reverses the ranking: the reconstructed task input carries a 20-70x larger normalized relative perturbation than the measurements themselves. Stressed to failure, the three lift regions exhibit distinct dominant signatures--collapse, imprinting, and coarsening. STSF+TPLS transfers without fine-tuning to a real single-pixel bench, where the reversal reappears as a proof of concept; inference takes about 14 ms per mask on an RTX 4090. Within the tested fixed-acquisition regime, measurement-to-space adaptivity therefore organizes both the clean-to-noisy operating envelope and the failure a system encounters. Code and pretrained weights: https://github.com/Hanyuyuan6/STSF-TPLS.
MG-SpaIR is a training-data-free framework for restoring a clean image from a single observation corrupted by a mixture of blur, downsampling, noise, and missing pixels. Building on implicit neural representations (INRs), we introduce a multi-grade coarse-to-fine residual hierarchy that progressively refines the reconstruction across resolution grades, improving representational fidelity and mitigating spectral limitations. To stabilize reconstruction optimization and suppress INR-induced artifacts, we further propose an explicit sparse proximal regularization (e.g., ℓ0-type) applied directly in the high-resolution image domain, which discourages spurious high-frequency patterns while preserving sharp structures. The resulting optimization is solved efficiently via a multi-grade proximal alternating scheme, and we establish convergence guarantees for the associated updates under standard regularity conditions. Experiments on mixed-degradation benchmarks demonstrate that MG-SpaIR consistently outperforms strong training-data-free baselines such as Deep Image Prior, providing a stable, interpretable, and data-efficient alternative to conventional learning-based restoration methods.
Many high-resolution imaging systems face the same fundamental question: when have enough measurements been collected to reconstruct an image accurately? We develop Conformalized Rate-Adaptive Sensing (CoRAS), a method that adaptively chooses an acquisition or compression rate for each image while keeping the reconstruction error below a target level with high probability. As measurements are collected, an image reconstruction model gradually recovers the true image, producing a reconstruction path over acquisition rates. CoRAS uses this path up to an early decision time to estimate the target stopping time, defined as the first time at which the reconstruction error falls below the target level. It then calibrates this estimate using images with similar early reconstruction behavior, producing an upper bound on the stopping time with marginal and approximate conditional coverage guarantees. Experiments on image datasets show that CoRAS attains the target stopping-time coverage, uses fewer measurements on average than fixed-rate stopping rules, and assigns more measurements to images that are harder to reconstruct.
Speckle fundamentally limits coherent imaging by introducing multiplicative, spatially correlated noise that obscures scene structure. Removing speckle noise from dynamic scenes--that do not benefit from conventional speckle averaging--is particularly challenging. We introduce a training-free framework that combines a spatiotemporal implicit neural representation with an aperture-aware maximum-likelihood formulation to recover dynamic, speckle-free imagery directly from noisy observations. The coherent likelihood explicitly models the aperture-dependent spatial covariance of speckle, enabling adaptation to arbitrary pupil geometries without retraining. A matrix-free implementation based on FFT-accelerated operators, stochastic approximations, and conjugate gradients makes optimization practical for realistic image sizes. Meanwhile, a blind holdout criterion provides automatic early stopping without clean reference data. Simulated and laboratory results demonstrate improved spatial fidelity, temporal consistency, and robustness to varying speckle statistics relative to classical, unsupervised, and supervised baselines.
Matthew R. Ziemann, Casey J. Pellizzari, Tyler J. Hardy +1