This isn't really the same thing (and I think compressed sensing might be the direction of research to check out further) but you might find it interesting - ch

This isn't really the same thing (and I think compressed sensing might be the direction of research to check out further) but you might find it interesting - check out the modulo camera; https://web.media.mit.edu/~hangzhao/modulo.html https://web.media.mit.edu/~hangzhao/modulo.html > A modulo camera could theoretically take unbounded radiance levels by keeping only the least significant bits. We show that with limited bit depth, very high radiance levels can be recovered from a single modulus image with our newly proposed unwrapping algorithm for natural images.