SINGLE-PHOTON 3D IMAGING

We propose a two acquisition strategies to deal with photon pileup. The first strategy involves optimally attenuating a fraction of the total light incident on the SPAD sensor. The second strategy of asynchronous acquisition involves temporally staggering the SPAD measurement windows with respect to the laser to average out the effect of photon pileup. When used in combination, these strategies enable us to mitigate photon pileup in acquisition itself and reliably estimate scene depths even in high ambient light. You can find interactive tools here: tiny.cc/attenuation and tiny.cc/asynchronous... Reconstructions for a castle scene: With insufficient attenuation, scene points closer to the camera are recovered correctly, but points farther away are lost due to ambient light. With extreme attenuation, points at all depths are recovered albeit with poor accuracy. Our optimal attenuation criterion provides accurate reconstruction over the whole depth range... Asynchronous acquisition is..