LAUSR

Engineer’. This dictionary is not a lexicon but rather a compact distillation of the core mathematical concepts which are essential for practitioners in this field. This chapter is one of the fine contributions of the editor. To ensure that optical engineers get the message concerning the value of this approach the chapter includes an example where Rayleigh’s classical limit on resolution is broken. Thus, despite the mainly mathematical nature of this chapter a physical consequence is exemplified. Moreover, the readers are given references to a number of experimental demonstrations of this breaking of the Rayleigh limit. Having got the target audience up to speed, subsequent chapters develop the theoretical and practical basis of compressive sensing. The book is organised in five sections with the first treating the theory of compressive sensing and its applications in optics. Two chapters on, respectively, optical architectures for compressive imaging and terahertz imaging with compressed sensing introduce compressive imaging systems. A section on ‘Multi-dimensional Optical Compressive Sensing’ includes chapters on compressive holography and spectral and hyper-spectral compressive imaging. The fourth section is devoted to compressive sensing microscopy, whilst a single chapter on phase retrieval is included in the final section. The material contained in the book’s 300 pages substantiate the assertion that the reader ‘will gain a complete introduction to theory, experiment and practical use for reducing hardware, shortening image scanning time and improving image resolution’. As this is a book dealing with optical imaging one may look carefully at the images used in the various chapters. Generally these are useful and of good quality but a number of figures either have scope for quality improvement or are rather featureless. The book is offered as a resource for the design of new devices with improved performance in terms of image quality and shorter acquisition times. It is probable that the topic is just a little too focused to be included in undergraduate teaching programmes but one can see a role for this book in master’s level teaching and certainly to support graduate researchers. Perhaps a selection from the theoretical material and the experimental aspects could, at a future date, form the basis of a valuable text book. However, bearing in mind that this is the first book on compressed sensing dealing with a wide variety of optical imaging and sensing applications, one cannot expect that all possible roles for this material are simultaneously satisfied at the first attempt. One is confident that this book will contribute to the growth of activity in compressive imaging and it thus appropriate to repeat the appreciation of the efforts of both the editor and the co-authors in assembling this volume.