Mechanisms for obtaining information from a scene

A device, comprising:

• a photon beam separator configured to separate a beam of photons associated with a scene into a plurality of photon sub-beams based on an attribute of the photons;
• an optical encoder configured to optically encode at least two photon sub-beams of the plurality of photon sub-beams by passing the at least two photon sub-beams through respective optically filtering patterns that correspond to respective encoding functions to generate at least two corresponding encoded photon sub-beams, wherein the respective optically filtering patterns are configured to alter at least one of a magnitude and phase of the at least two photon sub-beams;
• an optical combiner configured to optically combine the encoded photon sub-beams to generate a combined photon beam;
• a detector configured to detect the combined photon beam and to generate image data;
• and
• a decoder configured to decode the image data based on the plurality encoding functions to generate a plurality of sub-images, each sub-image corresponding to one of the at least two photon sub-beams.

A device, comprising:

• a photon beam separator configured to separate a beam of photons associated with a scene into a plurality of photon sub-beams based on an attribute of the photons;
• an optical encoder configured to optically encode at least two photon sub-beams of the plurality of photon sub-beams to generate at least two corresponding encoded photon sub-beams by passing the at least two photon sub-beams through respective optically filtering patterns that correspond to encoding functions of a plurality of encoding functions, each encoded photon sub-beam encoded based on the corresponding encoding function of the plurality of encoding functions;
• an optical combiner configured to optically combine the encoded photon sub-beams to generate a combined photon beam;
• a detector configured to detect the combined photon beam and to generate image data;
• and
• a decoder configured to decode the image data based on the plurality of encoding functions to generate a plurality of sub-images, each sub-image corresponding to one of the at least two photon sub-beams.