On evaluation of image quality in nonparaxial single-pixel imaging

High numerical apertures lead to an appearance of distortions in a single-shot image, which make obtaining images troublesome if not impossible. These obstacles can be overcome in single-pixel imaging, where different strategies lead to inspection of objects with a good resolution, contrast and brightness. Recent advances in flat photonic elements have enabled the creation of compact nonparaxial imaging systems, which are especially promising in the THz range of wavelengths, bringing advances to such fields as communication, material inspection and spectroscopy. In this work, we dive into the problematics of single-pixel imaging: we introduce an object sample, which we use to investigate the resolution, contrast and brightness of the classical two-lens imaging setup. We evaluate the nonparaxial imaging of the sample and report that the conditions for the best contrast and the best brightness are decoupled in nonparaxial single pixel imaging. To overcome this hurdle, we use two integral image quality assessment techniques from computational imaging theory and estimate the quality of the image in a virtual numerical THz imaging scenario. The localized mean square error metric did not cause additional constraints to the quality of the image, whereas the global mean square error has restricted the range of possible imaging setups. Thus, the computational integral image quality assessment techniques back up the main claim of this study that in the single-pixel imaging the resolution is decoupled from the image brightness.