Abstract: Mechanisms for increasing the rate of acquisition of compressed/encoded image representations are disclosed. An imaging system may deliver subsets of a modulated light stream onto respective light sensing devices. The light sensing devices may be sampled in parallel. Samples from each light sensing device may be used to construct a respective sub-image of a final image. The parallelism allows compressed images to be acquired at a higher rate. The number of light sensing devices and/or the number of pixels per image may be selected to achieve a target image acquisition rate. In another embodiment, spatial portions of the incident light stream are separated and delivered to separate light modulators. In yet another embodiment, the incident light stream is split into a plurality of beams, each of which retains the image present in the incident light stream and is delivered to a separate light modulator.