Abstract
Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging has the ability to reconstruct hidden objects from indirect light paths that scatter multiple times in the surrounding environment, which is of considerable interest in a wide range of applications. Whereas conventional imaging involves direct line-of-sight light transport to recover the visible objects, NLOS imaging aims to reconstruct the hidden objects from the indirect light paths that scatter multiple times, typically using the information encoded in the time-of-flight of scattered photons. Despite recent advances, NLOS imaging has remained at short-range realizations, limited by the heavy loss and the spatial mixing due to the multiple diffuse reflections. Here, both experimental and conceptual innovations yield hardware and software solutions to increase the standoff distance of NLOS imaging from meter to kilometer range, which is about three orders of magnitude longer than previous experiments. In hardware, we develop a high-efficiency, low-noise NLOS imaging system at near-infrared wavelength based on a dual-telescope confocal optical design. In software, we adopt a convex optimizer, equipped with a tailored spatial-temporal kernel expressed using three-dimensional matrix, to mitigate the effect of the spatial-temporal broadening over long standoffs. Together, these enable our demonstration of NLOS imaging and real-time tracking of hidden objects over a distance of 1.43 km. The results will open venues for the development of NLOS imaging techniques and relevant applications to real-world conditions.
Highlights
Non–line-of-sight imaging | optical imaging | computational imaging | computer vision narios such as transportation, defense, and public safety and security
With few exceptions [14, 23,24,25,26,27], most of the techniques that reconstruct NLOS scenes rely on high-resolution time-resolved detectors and use the information encoded in the time-of-flight (TOF) of photons that scatter multiple times
In the long-range case shown in Fig. 1, the temporal resolution of received photons after three bounces is characterized to be a full width at half-maximum of 1.1 ns in good weather conditions (SI Appendix, Fig. S4)
Summary
Non–line-of-sight imaging | optical imaging | computational imaging | computer vision narios such as transportation, defense, and public safety and security. In contrast to conventional LOS imaging [15,16,17], the diffuse nature of light reflected from typical surfaces in NLOS imaging leads to mixing of spatial information in the collected light, seemingly precluding useful scene reconstruction To address these issues, optical techniques for NLOS imaging that have been demonstrated include transient imaging [4,5,6,7,8, 10, 11, 18], speckle correlations [9, 19], acoustic echoes [20, 21], intensity imaging [14], confocal imaging [22], occlusion-based imaging [23,24,25,26,27], wave-propagation transformation [28, 29], Fermat paths [30], and so forth [1,2,3]. The achieved range is about three orders of magnitude longer than previous experiments [1, 2, 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14, 18, 19, 22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30] (SI Appendix, Table S1)
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