Exploiting Occlusion in Non-Line-of-Sight Active Imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel non-line-of-sight imaging method that leverages natural occluders to reconstruct hidden scenes without requiring expensive time-resolved measurements, simplifying hardware needs.

Contribution

It presents a new approach that uses scene occluders to enable non-line-of-sight imaging without specialized ultrafast hardware, expanding the potential for practical applications.

Findings

Occluders can replace time-resolved measurements for scene reconstruction.

The method simplifies hardware requirements for non-line-of-sight imaging.

Results demonstrate effective scene reconstruction using natural occluders.

Abstract

Active non-line-of-sight imaging systems are of growing interest for diverse applications. The most commonly proposed approaches to date rely on exploiting time-resolved measurements, i.e., measuring the time it takes for short light pulses to transit the scene. This typically requires expensive, specialized, ultrafast lasers and detectors that must be carefully calibrated. We develop an alternative approach that exploits the valuable role that natural occluders in a scene play in enabling accurate and practical image formation in such settings without such hardware complexity. In particular, we demonstrate that the presence of occluders in the hidden scene can obviate the need for collecting time-resolved measurements, and develop an accompanying analysis for such systems and their generalizations. Ultimately, the results suggest the potential to develop increasingly sophisticated future systems that are able to identify and exploit diverse structural features of the environment to reconstruct scenes hidden from view.