Adaptive Gating for Single-Photon 3D Imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive gating method for single-photon 3D imaging that dynamically adjusts based on prior photon data, significantly improving depth accuracy and speed in challenging outdoor lighting conditions.

Contribution

It presents a novel adaptive gating strategy using Thompson sampling that incorporates scene priors and photon detections, unlike traditional fixed schemes.

Findings

Reduces depth reconstruction error in high ambient light

Decreases acquisition time for 3D imaging

Operates effectively outdoors under strong sunlight

Abstract

Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) are growing in popularity for depth sensing tasks. However, SPADs still struggle in the presence of high ambient light due to the effects of pile-up. Conventional techniques leverage fixed or asynchronous gating to minimize pile-up effects, but these gating schemes are all non-adaptive, as they are unable to incorporate factors such as scene priors and previous photon detections into their gating strategy. We propose an adaptive gating scheme built upon Thompson sampling. Adaptive gating periodically updates the gate position based on prior photon observations in order to minimize depth errors. Our experiments show that our gating strategy results in significantly reduced depth reconstruction error and acquisition time, even when operating outdoors under strong sunlight conditions.