title: Images from Bits: Non-Iterative Image Reconstruction for Quanta Image Sensors.
abstract: A quanta image sensor (QIS) is a class of single-photon imaging devices that measure light intensity using oversampled binary observations. Because of the stochastic nature of the photon arrivals, data acquired by QIS is a massive stream of random binary bits. The goal of image reconstruction is to recover the underlying image from these bits. In this paper, we present a non-iterative image reconstruction algorithm for QIS. Unlike existing reconstruction methods that formulate the problem from an optimization perspective, the new algorithm directly recovers the images through a pair of nonlinear transformations and an off-the-shelf image denoising algorithm. By skipping the usual optimization procedure, we achieve orders of magnitude improvement in speed and even better image reconstruction quality. We validate the new algorithm on synthetic datasets, as well as real videos collected by one-bit single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) cameras.
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, 465 Northwestern Ave, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. stanchan@purdue.edu.|Department of Statistics, Purdue University, 250 N. University Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. stanchan@purdue.edu.
authors.forename: Stanley H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Chan
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, 465 Northwestern Ave, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. oelgendy@purdue.edu.
authors.forename: Omar A
authors.initials: OA
authors.lastname: Elgendy
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, 465 Northwestern Ave, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. wang470@purdue.edu.
authors.forename: Xiran
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
keywords: Anscombe Transform; image denoising; image reconstruction; maximum likelihood estimation (MLE); quanta image sensor (QIS); quantized Poisson statistics; single-photon image sensor