Towards transient imaging at interactive rates with single-photon detectors

Abstract

Active imaging at the picosecond timescale reveals transient light transport effects otherwise not accessible by computer vision and image processing algorithms. For example, analyzing the time of flight of short laser pulses emitted into a scene and scattered back to a detector allows for depth imaging, which is crucial for autonomous driving and many other applications. Moreover, analyzing or removing global light transport effects from photographs becomes feasible. While several transient imaging systems have recently been proposed using various imaging technologies, none is capable of acquiring transient images at interactive framerates. In this paper, we present an imaging system that records transient images at up to 25 Hz. We show several transient video clips recorded with this system and demonstrate transient imaging applications, including direct-global light transport separation and enhanced depth imaging.