What is disclosed is a system and method which reconstructs an N-pixel image of a scene such that Q pixel locations associated with identified regions of interest in a scene have a higher image quality when rendered relative to other pixels in the image. Acquisition and adaptive-quality compression are performed simultaneously by semi-synchronously or asynchronously temporally modulating an ordered set of sampling functions used to spatially modulate a pattern of light. The teachings hereof improve compression efficiency of a compressed sensing framework while improving encoding efficiency with respect to traditional compressed sensing techniques.