Compressive Single-Photon 3D Cameras | CVPR 2022
Channel: Felipe Gutierrez-Barragan
Date: 2022-06-08

Video presentation for the CVPR 2022 paper "Compressive Single-Photon 3D Cameras".
Authors: Felipe Gutierrez-Barragan, Atul Ingle, Trevor Seets, Mohit Gupta, and Andreas Velten
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Project Webpage: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~felipe/project-pages/2022-compressive-histograms/

Abstract

Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) are an emerging pixel technology for time-of-flight (ToF) 3D cameras that can capture the time-of-arrival of individual photons at picosecond resolution. To estimate depths, current SPAD-based 3D cameras measure the round-trip time of a laser pulse by building a per-pixel histogram of photon timestamps. As the spatial and timestamp resolution of SPAD-based cameras increase, their output data rates far exceed the capacity of existing data transfer technologies. One major reason for SPAD's bandwidth-intensive operation is the tight coupling that exists between depth resolution and histogram resolution. To weaken this coupling, we propose compressive single-photon histograms (CSPH). CSPHs are a per-pixel compressive representation of the high-resolution histogram, that is built on-the-fly, as each photon is detected. They are based on a family of linear coding schemes that can be expressed as a simple matrix operation. We design different CSPH coding schemes for 3D imaging and evaluate them under different signal and background levels, laser waveforms, and illumination setups. Our results show that a well-designed CSPH can consistently reduce data rates by 1-2 orders of magnitude without compromising depth precision.