Quantum 3D Imaging Promises All-in-Focus, Low Noise, High Resolution, Scanning-Free Depth Images

Arxiv.org paper "Towards quantum 3D imaging devices: the Qu3D project" by Cristoforo Abbattista, Leonardo Amoruso, Samuel Burri, Edoardo Charbon, Francesco Di Lena, Augusto Garuccio, Davide Giannella, Zdenek Hradil, Michele Iacobellis, Gianlorenzo Massaro, Paul Mos, Libor Motka, Martin Paur, Francesco V. Pepe, Michal Peterek, Isabella Petrelli, Jaroslav Rehacek, Francesca Santoro, Francesco Scattarella, Arin Ulku, Sergii Vasiukov, Michael Wayne, Milena D'Angelo, Claudio Bruschini, Maria Ieronymaki, and Bohumil Stoklasa, from Planetek Hellas (Greece), EPFL (Switzerland), INFN (Italy), Universit´a degli Studi di Bari (Italy), Palack´y University (Czech Republic).

Update: Now the paper is published in MDPI Applied Sciences too.

"We review the advancement of the research toward the design and implementation of quantum plenoptic cameras, radically novel 3D imaging devices that exploit both momentum-position entanglement and photon-number correlations to provide the typical refocusing and ultra-fast, scanning-free, 3D imaging capability of plenoptic devices, along with dramatically enhanced performances, unattainable in standard plenoptic cameras: diffraction-limited resolution, large depth of focus, and ultra-low noise. To further increase the volumetric resolution beyond the Rayleigh diffraction limit, and achieve the quantum limit, we are also developing dedicated protocols based on quantum Fisher information. However, for the quantum advantages of the proposed devices to be effective and appealing to end-users, two main challenges need to be tackled. First, due to the large number of frames required for correlation measurements to provide an acceptable SNR, quantum plenoptic imaging would require, if implemented with commercially available high-resolution cameras, acquisition times ranging from tens of seconds to a few minutes. Second, the elaboration of this large amount of data, in order to retrieve 3D images or refocusing 2D images, requires high-performance and time-consuming computation. To address these challenges, we are developing high-resolution SPAD arrays and high-performance low-level programming of ultra-fast electronics, combined with compressive sensing and quantum tomography algorithms, with the aim to reduce both the acquisition and the elaboration time by two orders of magnitude. Routes toward exploitation of the QPI devices will also be discussed."