Information-Driven Design of Imaging Systems

Berkeley AI Research proposes a NeurIPS 2025 framework that evaluates and optimizes imaging systems directly on information content, using a mutual information metric to unify factors like resolution and noise. The method needs only noise measurements and a noise model to estimate information, and provides an upper bound on true information. Across color photography, radio astronomy, lensless imaging, and microscopy, the metric predicts decoder performance and its optimized results match SOTA end-to-end methods with lower memory and compute and no task-specific decoder.