Single photon imaging and sensing of highly obscured objects around the corner

Abstract

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) optical imaging and sensing of objects imply new capabilities valuable to autonomous technology, machine vision, and other applications, in which case very few informative photons are buried in strong background counts. Here, we introduce a new approach to NLOS imaging and sensing using the picosecond-gated single photon detection generated by nonlinear frequency conversion. With exceptional signal isolation, this approach can reliably achieve imaging and position retrieval of obscured objects around the corner, in which case only 4 × 10−3 photons are needed to be detected per pulse for each pixel with high temporal resolution. Furthermore, the vibration frequencies of different objects can be resolved by analyzing the photon number fluctuation received within a ten-picosecond window, allowing NLOS acoustic sensing. Our results highlight the prospect of photon efficient NLOS imaging and sensing for real-world applications.