First-Photon Imaging and Other Imaging with Few Photons

LIDAR systems use single-photon detectors to enable long-range reflectivity and depth imaging. By exploiting an inhomogeneous Poisson process observation model and the typical structure of natural scenes, first-photon imaging demonstrates the possibility of accurate LIDAR with only 1 detected photon per pixel, where half of the detections are due to (uninformative) ambient light. I will explain the simple ideas behind first-photon imaging. Then I will present related subsequent works that enable the use of detector arrays and improve robustness to ambient light.    

Speaker: Vivek Goyal, Boston University