Single photon imaging with multi-scale time resolution

Abstract

To avoid echo photons to be submerged in noise in rough terrain or dynamic applications, a single photon imaging mechanism with multi-scale time resolution is proposed in this paper. Combining with adaptively thresholding technique, multiple histograms with different time resolutions are produced to cluster the echo photons into a time bin and then separate them from the noise. With microsecond-scale resolution, uncertainty in the position of an object can be reduced from several kilometers to 300 meters, and therefore the computational overheads are saved by only investigating depths with picosecond-scale resolution where an object is present. Reconstructed results of the two near surfaces show that the depth accuracy is less than 0.15 m in the conditions of 8 echo photons and 1 Mcps background count rate, even though the pulse width of laser source reaches 3.5 ns (equivalent to an uncertainty of 0.525 m). In addition, the echo can be distinguished from the noise clearly when the background count rate varies from 200 kcps to 1 Mcps. The proposed method is suitable for implementation in digital signal processor (DSP) due to low data volumes and computational overheads.