Real-time non-line-of-sight imaging

Abstract

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging aims at recovering the shape of objects hidden outside the direct line of sight of a camera. In this work, we report on a new approach for acquiring time-resolved measurements that are suitable for NLOS imaging. The system uses a confocalized single-photon detector and pulsed laser. As opposed to previously-proposed NLOS imaging systems, our setup is very similar to LIDAR systems used for autonomous vehicles and it facilitates a closed-form solution of the associated inverse problem, which we derive in this work. This algorithm, dubbed the Light Cone Transform, is three orders of magnitude faster and more memory efficient than existing methods. We demonstrate experimental results for indoor and outdoor scenes captured and reconstructed with the proposed confocal NLOS imaging system.