Unlimited Sensing: An Invitation To Modulo Sampling And Painless Hdr Reconstruction Beyond Shannon

All physical sensors are fundamentally limited by their dynamic range. This limitation manifests in clipped or saturated samples when using conventional ADCs. Thus, highlighting the mismatch between theory and practice of Shannon sampling theorem. Can we go beyond the dynamic range barrier? To overcome this fundamental bottleneck, recently, we have introduced the Unlimited Sensing Framework (USF)—a computational sampling paradigm that jointly harnesses a collaboration between hardware and algorithms. This demo provides the first hardware demonstration of the patented, end-to-end USF technology. To this end, we implement modulo non-linearity in analog electronics that folds high dynamic range (HDR) signals into modulo samples. Thereon, the inverse problem of recovering the HDR signal from folded measurements is solved using mathematically guaranteed recovery algorithms. Concretely, we show how a 50-60 V signal taken from the power socket can be captured by an ADC with a maximum range of 4.5 V and subsequently reconstructed numerically. We also discuss experiments based on Sparse Sampling, Biomedical Signals, Computed Tomography and Audio Signal Processing, thus opening pathways to new application areas.