Depth and Transient Imaging With Compressive SPAD Array Cameras

Qilin Sun, Xiong Dun, Yifan Peng, Wolfgang Heidrich; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 273-282

Time-of-flight depth imaging and transient imaging are two imaging modalities that have recently received a lot of interest. Despite much research, existing hardware systems are limited either in terms of temporal resolution or are prohibitively expensive. Arrays of Single Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) promise to fill this gap by providing higher temporal resolution at an affordable cost. Unfortunately SPAD arrays are to date only available in relatively small resolutions. In this work we aim to overcome the spatial resolution limit of SPAD arrays by employing a compressive sensing camera design. Using a DMD and custom optics, we achieve an image resolution of up to 800*400 on SPAD Arrays of resolution 64*32. Using our new data fitting model for the time histograms, we suppress the noise while abstracting the phase and amplitude information, so as to realize a temporal resolution of a few tens of picoseconds.