Contributions of this thesis reside on the strong foundation of sparse representations. Numerous applications are presented that utilize sparse representations for compression and compressed sensing of visual data. Specifically, we present a single sensor light field camera design, a compressive rendering method, a real time precomputed photorealistic rendering technique, light field (video) compression and real time rendering, compressive BRDF capture, and more. Another key contribution of this thesis is a general framework for compression and compressed sensing of visual data, regardless of the dimensionality. As a result, any type of discrete visual data with arbitrary dimensionality can be captured, compressed, and rendered in real time.
This thesis makes two theoretical contributions. In particular, uniqueness conditions for recovering a sparse signal under an ensemble of multidimensional dictionaries is presented. The theoretical results discussed here are useful for designing efficient capturing devices for multidimensional visual data. Moreover, we derive the probability of successful recovery of a noisy sparse signal using OMP, one of the most widely used algorithms for solving compressed sensing problems.