Single photon imaging based on a photon driven sparse sampling

Single photon three-dimensional (3D) imager can capture 3D profile details and see through obscuring objects with high sensitivity, making it promising in sensing and imaging applications. The key capabilities of such 3D imager lie on its depth resolution and multi-return discrimination. For conventional pulsed single photon lidar, these capabilities are limited by transmitter bandwidth and receiver bandwidth simultaneously. A single photon imager is proposed and experimentally demonstrated to implement time-resolved and multi-return imaging. Time-to-frequency conversion is performed to achieve millimetric depth resolution. Experimental results show that the depth resolution is better than 4.5 mm, even though time jitter of the SPAD reaches 1 ns and time resolution of the TCSPC module reaches 10 ns. Furthermore, photon driven sparse sampling mechanism allows us to discriminate multiple near surfaces, no longer limited by the receiver bandwidth. The simplicity of the system hardware enables low-cost and compact 3D imaging. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement