Videos du jour : under display cameras, SPADs

 

Designing Phase Masks for Under-Display Cameras

Diffractive blur and low light levels are two fundamental challenges in producing high-quality photographs in under-display cameras (UDCs). In this paper, we incorporate phase masks on display panels to tackle both challenges. Our design inserts two phase masks, specifically two microlens arrays, in front of and behind a display panel. The first phase mask concentrates light on the locations where the display is transparent so that more light passes through the display, and the second phase mask reverts the effect of the first phase mask. We further optimize the folding height of each microlens to improve the quality of PSFs and suppress chromatic aberration. We evaluate our design using a physically-accurate simulator based on Fourier optics. The proposed design is able to double the light throughput while improving the invertibility of the PSFs. Lastly, we discuss the effect of our design on the display quality and show that implementation with polarization-dependent phase masks can leave the display quality uncompromised.

 

 

Passive Ultra-Wideband Single-Photon Imaging

We consider the problem of imaging a dynamic scene over an extreme range of timescales simultaneously—seconds to picoseconds—and doing so passively, without much light, and without any timing signals from the light source(s) emitting it. Because existing flux estimation techniques for single-photon cameras break down in this regime, we develop a flux probing theory that draws insights from stochastic calculus to enable reconstruction of a pixel’s time-varying flux from a stream of monotonically-increasing photon detection timestamps. We use this theory to (1) show that passive free-running SPAD cameras have an attainable frequency bandwidth that spans the entire DC-to-31 GHz range in low-flux conditions, (2) derive a novel Fourier-domain flux reconstruction algorithm that scans this range for frequencies with statistically-significant support in the timestamp data, and (3) ensure the algorithm’s noise model remains valid even for very low photon counts or non-negligible dead times. We show the potential of this asynchronous imaging regime by experimentally demonstrating several never-seen-before abilities: (1) imaging a scene illuminated simultaneously by sources operating at vastly different speeds without synchronization (bulbs, projectors, multiple pulsed lasers), (2) passive non-line-of-sight video acquisition, and (3) recording ultra-wideband video, which can be played back later at 30 Hz to show everyday motions—but can also be played a billion times slower to show the propagation of light itself.

 
SoDaCam: Software-defined Cameras via Single-Photon Imaging

Reinterpretable cameras are defined by their post-processing capabilities that exceed traditional imaging. We present "SoDaCam" that provides reinterpretable cameras at the granularity of photons, from photon-cubes acquired by single-photon devices. Photon-cubes represent the spatio-temporal detections of photons as a sequence of binary frames, at frame-rates as high as 100 kHz. We show that simple transformations of the photon-cube, or photon-cube projections, provide the functionality of numerous imaging systems including: exposure bracketing, flutter shutter cameras, video compressive systems, event cameras, and even cameras that move during exposure. Our photon-cube projections offer the flexibility of being software-defined constructs that are only limited by what is computable, and shot-noise. We exploit this flexibility to provide new capabilities for the emulated cameras. As an added benefit, our projections provide camera-dependent compression of photon-cubes, which we demonstrate using an implementation of our projections on a novel compute architecture that is designed for single-photon imaging.