High-Flux Count-Free Single-Photon 3D Cameras
arXiv:2608.18306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-photon cameras based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) technology are gaining popularity for 3D sensing, thanks to their extreme sensitivity and time resolution. There are two key challenges with single-photon cameras that limit their widespread use: (i) they suffer from non-linear distortions called ''pile-up'' when operated in high-photon-flux conditions, and (ii) they generate a large volume of raw photon data, creating a severe data bottleneck at each sensor pixel. In this work, we show that while compressive capture techniques successfully mitigate data transfer challenges, they exacerbate the effects of dead-time distortion because they fail to retain sufficient information about the photon detection history to allow post-processing pile-up correction via existing methods. We propose a new computational-imaging method that combines free-running capture with an analysis-by-synthesis software pipeline to mitigate pile-up distortions. Our results with hardware emulations and full-scene and single-pixel simulations show that our method can reliably capture scene distance and reflectance over a wide range of illumination conditions. Our work will enable high-resolution SPAD cameras that are severely bandwidth-constrained to operate in real-world high-flux scenarios.
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[Submitted on 18 Aug 2026]
Title:High-Flux Count-Free Single-Photon 3D Cameras
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Abstract:Single-photon cameras based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) technology are gaining popularity for 3D sensing, thanks to their extreme sensitivity and time resolution. There are two key challenges with single-photon cameras that limit their widespread use: (i) they suffer from non-linear distortions called ''pile-up'' when operated in high-photon-flux conditions, and (ii) they generate a large volume of raw photon data, creating a severe data bottleneck at each sensor pixel. In this work, we show that while compressive capture techniques successfully mitigate data transfer challenges, they exacerbate the effects of dead-time distortion because they fail to retain sufficient information about the photon detection history to allow post-processing pile-up correction via existing methods. We propose a new computational-imaging method that combines free-running capture with an analysis-by-synthesis software pipeline to mitigate pile-up distortions. Our results with hardware emulations and full-scene and single-pixel simulations show that our method can reliably capture scene distance and reflectance over a wide range of illumination conditions. Our work will enable high-resolution SPAD cameras that are severely bandwidth-constrained to operate in real-world high-flux scenarios.
Comments: Presented at IEEE ICCP 2026 (Best Paper Award Winner). To appear in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.18306 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.18306v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.18306
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Kaustubh Sadekar [view email] [v1] Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:35:41 UTC (33,111 KB)
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