Single photon 3D imaging based on a few echo photons

Abstract

As a new type of active imaging technology, single photon counting 3D imaging has great application value in the fields of biophotonic imaging, remote sensing mapping, weak target detection, etc. Generally, in order to mitigate the influence of noise photons during the detection, it is necessary to accumulate hundreds of photons per pixel to form a histogram of arrival photons to obtain an accurate 3D image. However, in conditions of low illumination or long distances targets detecting, the available echo energy and the allowable integration time generally do not satisfy the collection of such large number of photons. Therefore, we research on single photon 3D imaging method based on a few echo photons, and several image reconstruction algorithm under strong background noise environment was proposed, including traditional methods based on pixels as well as newly proposed methods based on spatial correlation. We use the 3D point cloud signal to achieve the 3D reconstruction of the target reflectivity signal and distance information.