# High Flux Passive Imaging with Single-Photon Sensors

## TL;DR

This paper introduces passive free-running SPAD imaging, enabling high dynamic range 2D intensity images under ambient light by estimating scene brightness from photon timing, surpassing conventional sensors by over 100 times.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel PF-SPAD imaging method that uses photon timing to estimate scene brightness, achieving unprecedented dynamic range without active illumination.

## Key findings

- Achieves over 2 orders of magnitude improvement in dynamic range.
- Can image scenes with a 1,000,000:1 brightness ratio.
- Provides a theoretical model and brightness estimator for PF-SPADs.

## Abstract

Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) are an emerging technology with a unique capability of capturing individual photons with high timing precision. SPADs are being used in several active imaging systems (e.g., fluorescence lifetime microscopy and LiDAR), albeit mostly limited to low photon flux settings. We propose passive free-running SPAD (PF-SPAD) imaging, an imaging modality that uses SPADs for capturing 2D intensity images with unprecedented dynamic range under ambient lighting, without any active light source. Our key observation is that the precise inter-photon timing measured by a SPAD can be used for estimating scene brightness under ambient lighting conditions, even for very bright scenes. We develop a theoretical model for PF-SPAD imaging, and derive a scene brightness estimator based on the average time of darkness between successive photons detected by a PF-SPAD pixel. Our key insight is that due to the stochastic nature of photon arrivals, this estimator does not suffer from a hard saturation limit. Coupled with high sensitivity at low flux, this enables a PF-SPAD pixel to measure a wide range of scene brightness, from very low to very high, thereby achieving extreme dynamic range. We demonstrate an improvement of over 2 orders of magnitude over conventional sensors by imaging scenes spanning a dynamic range of 1,000,000:1.