However, these methods have a low sequence depth (i.e., the number of captured frames in each acquisition). To achieve a sub-nanosecond frame interval, various active illumination-based methods have been developed, including the frequency-dividing imaging 23, the angle-dividing imaging 24, sequentially-timed all-optical mapping photography 25, and frequency-domain streak imaging 26.

However, the speed of light imposes imaging frame rates at the billion-frame-per-second (Gfps) level 21, far beyond the readout speed of the state-of-the-art charge coupled device (CCD) and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors 22. The ability to capture photon’s time of arrival without repeating the measurement opens new routes for understanding underlying mechanisms in physics 18, chemistry 19, and biology 20 that are manifested in non-repeatable or difficult-to-reproduce events. Existing approaches can measure different combinations of photon tags besides 2D spatial information to enable three-dimensional (3D, e.g., spectral 10, volumetric 11, and temporal 12), four-dimensional (4D, e.g., spectro-volumetric 13, plenoptic 14, and polarimetric 15, 16), and even five-dimensional (5D, e.g., spectro-polarimetric 17) imaging.Īs a subset of single-shot high-dimensional optical imaging, single-shot temporal imaging is of tremendous interest to many scientific communities. Single-shot high-dimensional optical imaging modalities have experienced rapid growth in the past decade. Such a parallel acquisition has maximized the captured information and measurement efficiency. To overcome these barriers, many single-shot high-dimensional optical imaging techniques, in which multiple photon tags are measured in one acquisition, have been developed 9. However, this scheme is subject to the assumption that the event is precisely repeatable 7 and also inherently suffers from a low measurement efficiency 8. By repeating measurements with varied parameters in the other dimensions, a high-dimensional array can be assembled. In brief, each measurement captures either a one-dimensional (1D) column or a two-dimensional (2D) slice 5, 6. So far, most high-dimensional optical imaging systems acquire data through scanning.

These high-dimensional optical data are ubiquitously used in numerous fields of study, including biomedicine 2, agriculture 3, and electronics 4. High-dimensional optical imaging is indispensable to maximally extract information carried by different photon tags 1. This system also allowed three-dimensional ultrafast imaging of the linear polarization properties of a single ultrashort laser pulse propagating in a scattering medium. We applied SP-CUP to the spatiotemporal characterization of linear polarization dynamics in early-stage plasma emission from laser-induced breakdown. Synergizing compressed sensing and streak imaging with stereoscopy and polarimetry, SP-CUP enables video-recording of five photon tags ( x, y, z: space t: time of arrival and ψ: angle of linear polarization) at 100 billion frames per second with a picosecond temporal resolution. Here, we overcome this long-standing limitation by implementing stereo-polarimetric compressed ultrafast photography (SP-CUP) to record light-speed high-dimensional events in a single exposure. Existing high-dimensional optical imaging techniques that record space and polarization cannot detect the photon’s time of arrival owing to the limited speeds of the state-of-the-art electronic sensors. Simultaneous and efficient ultrafast recording of multiple photon tags contributes to high-dimensional optical imaging and characterization in numerous fields.

Light speed ns