Single-photon cameras based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) technology are gaining popularity for 3D sensing, thanks to their extreme sensitivity and time resolution. There are two key challenges with single-photon cameras that limit their widespread use: (i) they suffer from non-linear distortions called''pile-up''when operated in high-photon-flux conditions, and (ii) they generate a large volume of raw photon data, creating a severe data bottleneck at each sensor pixel. In this work, we show that while compressive capture techniques successfully mitigate data transfer challenges, they exacerbate the effects of dead-time distortion because they fail to retain sufficient information about the photon detection history to allow post-processing pile-up correction via existing methods. We propose a new computational-imaging method that combines free-running capture with an analysis-by-synthesis software pipeline to mitigate pile-up distortions. Our results with hardware emulations and full-scene and single-pixel simulations show that our method can reliably capture scene distance and reflectance over a wide range of illumination conditions. Our work will enable high-resolution SPAD cameras that are severely bandwidth-constrained to operate in real-world high-flux scenarios.
Single photon avalanche detectors (SPADs) have emerged as a potential successor of current wavefront sensor (WFS) and science camera detectors. Due to their lack of readout noise and ability to operate at very high frame-rates they are particularly well suited for low flux imaging – as is often the case when observing...
Robin Swanson, Suresh Sivanandam· Astronomical Telescopes + In...· 0 citations
Single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) cameras operate fundamentally differently from conventional cameras due to their photon-counting nature. Each frame produces a binary image: pixels report zero if no photons arrived during exposure, and one if one or more photons arrived. Reconstructing a scene or inferring its prop...
Haejoon Lee, Mohit Gupta, Vijayakumar Bhagavatula et al.· 0 citations
New SPAD-based, single-photon, fast-timing detectors are becoming increasingly attractive for astronomy. These detectors enable a new modality for wavefront sensing: photon time-of-arrival. Pyramid wavefront sensors (PWFS) offer excellent sensitivity, but suffer from non-linear behavior. This is typically mitigated by...
S. Carrier, J. Véran, M. V. van Kooten et al.· Astronomical Telescopes + In...· 3 citations
Light-field microscopy enables snapshot volumetric imaging, but its information rate is constrained by both optical encoding and detector readout architecture. Here we develop a task-dependent Fisher-information framework that evaluates optical encoders relative to the detector resource limiting acquisition throughput....
Quantitative fluorescence microscopy requires photon-efficiency, speed and accurate intensity and lifetime measurements. Time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) simultaneously captures intensity and lifetime, but photon pile-up distorts both signals at high count rates, preventing fast acquisitions. Existing cor...
Felipe Velasquez Moros, Dorian Amiet, Daria Skwarzynska et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
