Adaptive Gating for Single-Photon 3D Imaging
This addresses a domain-specific problem for depth sensing applications, offering an incremental improvement over existing non-adaptive gating methods.
The paper tackles the problem of depth sensing with single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) in high ambient light, where pile-up effects cause errors, by proposing an adaptive gating scheme based on Thompson sampling that updates gate positions using prior photon observations, resulting in significantly reduced depth reconstruction error and acquisition time, even under strong sunlight conditions.
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.