One-Bit Time-Resolved Imaging

Abstract

Spatial resolution is one of the fundamental bottlenecks in the area of time-resolved imaging. Since each pixel measures a scene-dependent time profile, there is a technological limit on the size of pixel arrays that can be simultaneously used to perform measurements. To overcome this barrier, in this paper, we propose a low-complexity, one-bit sensing scheme. On the data capture front, the time-resolved measurements are mapped to a sequence of +1 and -1. This leads to an extremely simple implementation and at the same time poses a new form of information loss. On the image recovery front, our one-bit time-resolved imaging scheme is complemented with a non-iterative recovery algorithm that can handle the case of single and multiple light paths. Extensive computer simulations and physical experiments benchmarked against conventional Time-of-Flight imaging data corroborate our theoretical framework. Thus, our low-complexity alternative to time-resolved imaging can indeed potentially lead to a new imaging methodology.