Photon-Efficient Active Imaging

Conventional photography collects tens of thousands of photons at each camera pixel. However, that number of photons isn’t required to form accurate images.

Using time-correlated single-photon counting, our group and collaborators at MIT demonstrated that forming accurate depth and reflectivity images is possible using as little as one photon detection per scene pixel, increasing the photon efficiency of image formation by several orders of magnitude.

Such methods can enable long-distance range measurements, fast acquisition for real time systems like autonomous vehicles, or even low-dose measurements for biological applications.

We have continued to expand the capabilities of imaging with very few photons, including exploring scenes with multiple depths, increasing robustness to high ambient light levels, improving depth resolution for systems with coarse time quantization, and compensating for dead times in single-photon detectors.

Selected Publications

1. Improving Lidar Depth Resolution With Dither
   • J. Rapp, R. M. A. Dawson, and V. K. Goyal, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Image Processing (ICIP), October 2018.
   • DOI: 10.1109/ICIP.2018.8451528
     • Winner of Best Student Paper Award, 3rd Place
2. A Few Photons Among Many: Unmixing Signal and Noise for Photon-Efficient Active Imaging
   • J. Rapp and V. K. Goyal, IEEE Trans. Computational Imaging, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 445-459, September 2017.
   • DOI: 10.1109/TSP.2017.2706028
     • Code
3. Photon-Efficient Imaging with a Single-Photon Camera
   • D. Shin, F. Xu, D. Venkatraman, R. Lussana, F. Villa, F. Zappa, V. K. Goyal, F. N. C. Wong, and J. H. Shapiro, Nature Communications, vol. 7, art. no. 12046, 24 June 2016.
   • DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12046
     • See also Nature Photonics research highlight: D. Pile, Photon per pixel, Nature Photonics, vol. 10, no. 8, p. 498, August 2016.
     • Code and data
4. Computational Multi-Depth Single-Photon Imaging
   • D. Shin, F. Xu, F. N. C. Wong, J. H. Shapiro, and V. K. Goyal, Optics Express, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 1873-1888, February 2016.
   • DOI: 10.1364/OE.24.001873
     • Code and data
5. Photon-Efficient Computational 3D and Reflectivity Imaging with Single-Photon Detectors
   • D. Shin, A. Kirmani, V. K. Goyal, and J. H. Shapiro, IEEE Trans. Computational Imaging, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 112-125, June 2015.
   • DOI: 10.1109/TSP.2015.2453093
     • Code and data
6. First-Photon Imaging
   • A. Kirmani, D. Venkatraman, D. Shin, A. Colaço, F. N. C. Wong, J. H. Shapiro, V. K. Goyal, Science, vol. 343, no. 6166, pp. 58-61, 3 Jan 2014; published online in Science Express 29 Nov 2013.
   • DOI: 10.1126/science.1246775
     • See also editors’ commentary: This Week in Science: Computing an Image, Science, vol. 343, no. 6166, p. 5, 3 Jan 2014.
     • Code and data