title: Photon-efficient imaging with a single-photon camera.
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.
authors.affiliation: Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Dongeek
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Shin
authors.affiliation: Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Feihu
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-1643-225X
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Dheera
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Venkatraman
authors.affiliation: Dip. Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo Da Vinci, 32, Milano I-20133, Italy.
authors.forename: Rudi
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-5704-0343
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lussana
authors.affiliation: Dip. Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo Da Vinci, 32, Milano I-20133, Italy.
authors.forename: Federica
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9840-0269
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Villa
authors.affiliation: Dip. Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo Da Vinci, 32, Milano I-20133, Italy.
authors.forename: Franco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Zappa
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University, 1 Silber Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
authors.forename: Vivek K
authors.initials: VK
authors.lastname: Goyal
authors.affiliation: Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Franco N C
authors.initials: FN
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.affiliation: Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey H
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-6094-5861
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Shapiro