Improved single-photon active imaging through ambient noise guided missing data filling

Abstract

Active illumination time-of-flight single photon imaging has the advantage of high photon sensitivity which is suitable for imaging in long-distance and low light scenarios. The problem of missing information in depth profile of single photon imaging will deteriorate the imaging quality. The noise which comes from the scene reflected of the ambient light has always been ignored or excluded as strong interference of the active signal. In this letter, an ambient noise guided missing data filling method is proposed to improve the single-photon imaging quality. This method takes the ambient noise which was considered as interference in the past as the guidance for the filling of missing information in depth image. Both simulated and experimental verification are implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The observed experimental root mean square error has been improved from 1.97 m to 0.38 m and the structural similarity has been improved from 0.28 to 0.81 with the signal to background noise ratio of 0.15.