Computational Imaging with Few photons, or Ions

Описание: Dr. Vivek Goyal, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Boston University

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 touch upon related subsequent works that mitigate the limitations of detector arrays, withstand 25-times more ambient light, allow for unknown ambient light levels, and capture multiple depths per pixel. The philosophy of modeling at the level of individual particles is also at the root of current work in scanned ion beam microscopy.