Photon-efficient imaging with a single-photon camera
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Photon-efficient.pdf
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Author(s)
Shin, Dongeek
Venkatraman, Dheera
Lussana, Rudi
Villa, Federica
Zappa, Franco
Goyal, Vivek K.
Xu, Feihu
Wong, Ngai Chuen
Shapiro, Jeffrey H
Date Issued
June 2016
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Shin, Dongeek, Feihu Xu, Dheera Venkatraman, Rudi Lussana, Federica Villa, Franco Zappa, Vivek K. Goyal, Franco N. C. Wong, and Jeffrey H. Shapiro. “Photon-Efficient Imaging with a Single-Photon Camera.” Nature Communications 7 (June 24, 2016): 12046.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Reconstructing a scene’s 3D structure and reflectivity accurately with an active imaging system operating in low-light-level conditions has wide-ranging applications, spanning biological imaging to remote sensing. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a depth and reflectivity imaging system with a single-photon camera that generates high-quality images from ∼1 detected signal photon per pixel. Previous achievements of similar photon efficiency have been with conventional raster-scanning data collection using single-pixel photon counters capable of ∼10-ps time tagging. In contrast, our camera’s detector array requires highly parallelized time-to-digital conversions with photon time-tagging accuracy limited to ∼ns. Thus, we develop an array-specific algorithm that converts coarsely time-binned photon detections to highly accurate scene depth and reflectivity by exploiting both the transverse smoothness and longitudinal sparsity of natural scenes. By overcoming the coarse time resolution of the array, our framework uniquely achieves high photon efficiency in a relatively short acquisition time.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12046
