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Fig. 1. We propose the use of cheap, small off-the-shelf distance sensors (far left) for a variety of computational imaging and vision tasks, and demonstrate and evaluate their capabilities in emerging sensing applications like (from left to right) material classification, non-line-of-sight tracking, and depth imaging.Time-correlated imaging is an emerging sensing modality that has been shown to enable promising application scenarios, including lidar ranging, fluorescence lifetime imaging, and even non-line-of-sight sensing. A leading technology for obtaining time-correlated light measurements are singlephoton avalanche diodes (SPADs), which are extremely sensitive and capable of temporal resolution on the order of tens of picoseconds. However, the rare and expensive optical setups used by researchers have so far prohibited these novel sensing techniques from entering the mass market. Fortunately, SPADs also exist in a radically cheaper and more power-efficient version that has been widely deployed as proximity sensors in mobile devices for almost a decade. These commodity SPAD sensors can be obtained at a mere few cents per detector pixel. However, their inferior data quality and severe technical drawbacks compared to their high-end counterparts necessitate the use of additional optics and suitable processing algorithms. In this paper, we adopt an existing evaluation platform for commodity SPAD sensors, and modify it to unlock time-of-flight (ToF) histogramming and hence computational imaging. Based on this platform, we develop and demonstrate a family of hardware/software systems that, for the first time, implement applications that had so far been limited to significantly more advanced, higher-priced setups: direct ToF depth imaging, non-line-of-sight object tracking, and material classification.

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Imaging across both the full transverse spatial and temporal dimensions of a scene with high precision in all three coordinates is key to applications ranging from LIDAR to fluorescence lifetime imaging. However, compromises that sacrifice, for example, spatial resolution at the expense of temporal resolution are often required, in particular when the full 3-dimensional data cube is required in short acquisition times. We introduce a sensor fusion approach that combines data having low-spatial resolution but high temporal precision gathered with a single-photon-avalanche-diode (SPAD) array with data that has high spatial but no temporal resolution, such as that acquired with a standard CMOS camera. Our method, based on blurring the image on the SPAD array and computational sensor fusion, reconstructs time-resolved images at significantly higher spatial resolution than the SPAD input, upsampling numerical data by a factor $$12 \times 12$$ 12 × 12 , and demonstrating up to $$4 \times 4$$ 4 × 4 upsampling of experimental data. We demonstrate the technique for both LIDAR applications and FLIM of fluorescent cancer cells. This technique paves the way to high spatial resolution SPAD imaging or, equivalently, FLIM imaging with conventional microscopes at frame rates accelerated by more than an order of magnitude.

Fig. 1. We introduce a method that uses time-of-flight (ToF) imagers not for measuring scene depth, but rather as analog computational imagers that can directly measure difference values at a pixel level. We demonstrate this principle with a slightly modified ToF camera system (a), where simple reconfigurations in the optical path enable a wide range of imaging modalities. For instance, our system can directly sense temporal gradients (b), depth edges (c), direct-lightonly images (d) and spatial gradients ( Fig. 10) -each in a single exposure and without any additional decoding steps. We further show that the remarkable noise statistics of such imagers can be exploited to extract two color channels (here: red and blue) from a single snapshot taken under red and blue illumination (e). The top images in columns (b)-(e) are reference photographs of the respective scenes; the bottom ones visualize the output of our system.Computational photography encompasses a diversity of imaging techniques, but one of the core operations performed by many of them is to compute image differences. An intuitive approach to computing such differences is to capture several images sequentially and then process them jointly. Usually, this approach leads to artifacts when recording dynamic scenes. In this paper, we introduce a snapshot difference imaging approach that is directly implemented in the sensor hardware of emerging time-of-flight cameras. With a variety of examples, we demonstrate that the proposed snapshot difference imaging technique is useful for direct-global illumination separation, for direct imaging of spatial and temporal image gradients, for direct depth edge imaging, and more.Additional Key Words and Phrases: computational photography, time-offlight

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