Bayesian neuromorphic imaging for single-photon LiDAR

Abstract

This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to enable single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays to be used as pseudo event cameras that report changes in the scene. Motivated by the working principle of event cameras, which produce sparse events associated with light flux changes, we adopt a changepoint detection strategy to generate intensity and depth change event streams from direct time-of-flight (dToF) sequences measured by SPAD arrays. Although not our main goal, the algorithm also produces as a by-product, intensity and depth estimates. Unlike the output of passive event cameras that only correspond to light flux changes, the change events detected from the sequential dToFs can relate to changes in light flux and/or depth. The integration of the proposed Bayesian approach with single-photon LiDAR (SPL) systems provides a novel solution to achieve active neuromorphic 3D imaging that offers the advantages of significantly reduced output redundancy and in particular the capacity to report scene depth changes. For each pixel of the SPAD array, asynchronous events are generated by performing online Bayesian inference to detect changepoints and estimate the model parameters simultaneously from individual single-photon measurements. Experiments are conducted on synthetic data and real dToF measurements acquired by a 172×126 pixel SPAD camera to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed Bayesian approach.