Low-Budget Transient Imaging using Photonic Mixer Devices

Felix Heide*, Matthias B. Hullin*, James Gregson, Wolfgang Heidrich (* joint first authors)
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 32 (4), 2013.

Abstract

Transient imaging is an exciting a new imaging modality that can
be used to understand light propagation in complex environments,
and to capture and analyze scene properties such as the shape of
hidden objects or the reflectance properties of surfaces.
Unfortunately, research in transient imaging has so far been hin-
dered by the high cost of the required instrumentation, as well as
the fragility and difficulty to operate and calibrate devices such as
femtosecond lasers and streak cameras.
In this paper, we explore the use of photonic mixer devices (PMD), commonly used in inexpensive time-of-flight cameras, as alternative instrumentation for transient imaging. We obtain a sequence of differently modulated images with a PMD sensor, impose a model for local light/object interaction, and use an optimization procedure to infer transient images given the measurements and model. The resulting method produces transient images at a cost several orders
of magnitude below existing methods, while simultaneously simplifying and speeding up the capture process.

Files

BibTeX Citation

@article{HeideSIG2013, author = {Felix Heide and Matthias B. Hullin and James Gregson and Wolfgang Heidrich}, title = {Low-Budget Transient Imaging using Photonic Mixer Devices}, journal = {ACM Trans. Graph. (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2013)}, volume = {32}, number = {4}, year = {2013}, pages = {45:1--45:10}, }