For a much better explanation of this stuff from Terry Tao (mentioned in the article as being responsible for much of the theoretical basis of the technique; Fi

For a much better explanation of this stuff from Terry Tao (mentioned in the article as being responsible for much of the theoretical basis of the technique; Fields medallist; very very smart chap) see http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/compressed-sensing-and-single-pixel-cameras/ http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/compressed-sensing-... . One important way in which I think the Wired piece is Just Plain Wrong: you don't sample a small fraction of the individual image pixels. You take a small number of samples, each of which is a kinda-random combination of image pixels. Some examples and further quite-friendly explanation here: http://www.acm.caltech.edu/l1magic/examples.html http://www.acm.caltech.edu/l1magic/examples.html . More from Tao: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/the-uniform-uncertainty-principle-and-compressed-sensing/ http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/the-uniform-uncerta... and http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/reflections-on-compressed-sensing/ http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/reflections-on-comp... both of which are mostly links to more detailed things, well worth reading if you don't mind mathematics.