Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) are becoming popular in time-of-flight depth-ranging due to their unique ability to capture individual photons with picosecond timing resolution. However, ambient light (e.g., sunlight) incident on a SPAD-based 3D camera leads to severe non-linear distortions (pileup) in the measured waveform, resulting in large depth errors. We propose asynchronous single-photon 3D imaging, a family of acquisition schemes to mitigate pileup during data acquisition itself. Asynchronous acquisition temporally misaligns SPAD measurement windows and the laser cycles through deterministically predefined or randomized offsets. Our key insight is that pileup distortions can be "averaged out" by choosing a sequence of offsets that span the entire depth range. We develop a generalized image formation model and perform theoretical analysis to explore the space of asynchronous acquisition schemes and design high-performance schemes. Our simulations and experiments demonstrate an improvement in depth accuracy of up to an order of magnitude as compared to the state-ofthe-art, across a wide range of imaging scenarios, including those with high ambient flux. * Equal contribution †
Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) are starting to play a pivotal role in the development of photon-efficient, long-range LiDAR systems.However, due to nonlinearities in their image formation model, a high photon flux (e.g., due to strong sunlight) leads to distortion of the incident temporal waveform, and potentially, large depth errors. Operating SPADs in low flux regimes can mitigate these distortions, but, often requires attenuating the signal and thus, results in low signal-to-noise ratio. In this paper, we address the following basic question: what is the optimal photon flux that a SPAD-based LiDAR should be operated in? We derive a closed form expression for the optimal flux, which is quasi-depth-invariant, and depends on the ambient light strength. The optimal flux is lower than what a SPAD typically measures in real world scenarios, but surprisingly, considerably higher than what is conventionally suggested for avoiding distortions. We propose a simple, adaptive approach for achieving the optimal flux by attenuating incident flux based on an estimate of ambient light strength. Using extensive simulations and a hardware prototype, we show that the optimal flux criterion holds for several depth estimators, under a wide range of illumination conditions. †
We investigate synthesis of a large effective aperture using a sparse array of subarrays. We employ a multi-objective optimization framework for placement of subarrays within a prescribed area dictated by form factor constraints, trading off the smaller beam width obtained by spacing out the subarrays against the grating and side lobes created by sparse placement. We assess the performance of our designs for the fundamental problem of bearing estimation for one or more sources, comparing performance against estimation-theoretic bounds. Our tiled architecture is motivated by recent progress in low-cost hardware realizations of moderately sized antenna arrays (which play the role of subarrays) in the millimeter wave band, and our numerical examples are based on 16-element (4 × 4) subarrays in the 60 GHz unlicensed band.
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