Photon-efficient imaging, which captures 3D images with single-photon sensors, has enabled a wide range of applications. However, two major challenges limit the reconstruction performance, i.e., the low photon counts accompanied by low signal-to-background ratio (SBR) and the multiple returns. In this paper, we propose a unified deep neural network that, for the first time, explicitly addresses these two challenges, and simultaneously recovers depth maps and intensity images from photon-efficient measurements. Starting from a general image formation model, our network is constituted of one encoder, where a non-local block is utilized to exploit the long-range correlations in both spatial and temporal dimensions of the raw measurement, and two decoders, which are designed to recover depth and intensity, respectively. Meanwhile, we investigate the statistics of the background noise photons and propose a noise prior block to further improve the reconstruction performance. The proposed network achieves decent reconstruction fidelity even under extremely low photon counts / SBR and heavy blur caused by the multiple-return effect, which significantly surpasses the existing methods. Moreover, our network trained on simulated data generalizes well to real-world imaging systems, which greatly extends the application scope of photon-efficient imaging in challenging scenarios with a strict limit on optical flux. Code is available at https://github.com/JiayongO-O/PENonLocal.

Single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) has been widely used in active 3D imaging due to its extremely high photon sensitivity and picosecond time resolution. However, long-range active 3D imaging is still a great challenge, since only a few signal photons mixed with strong background noise can return from multiple reflectors of the scene due to the divergence of the light beam and the receiver's field of view (FoV), which would bring considerable distortion and blur to the recovered depth map. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based depth reconstruction method for long range single-photon 3D imaging where the “multiple-returns” issue exists. Specifically, we model this problem as a deblurring task and design a multi-scale convolutional neural network combined with elaborate loss functions, which promote the reconstruction of an accurate depth map with fine details and clear boundaries of objects. The proposed method achieves superior performance over several different sizes of receiver's FoV on a synthetic dataset compared with existing state-of-the-art methods and the trained model under a specific FoV has a strong generalization capability across different sizes of FoV, which is essential for practical applications. Moreover, we conduct outdoor experiments and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in a real-world long range imaging system.

In this paper, we proposed a medium access scheme for high-rate WPAN with ultra wideband (UWB) physical layer (PHY). In this scheme, piconet administration packets and user data packets are transmitted on two different layers which are divided by two spreading codes. Since this scheme needs only two spreading codes, the code can be designed with high autocorrelation and low cross-correlation. Therefore, the issue of complexity caused by the adoption of spreading code is greatly reduced. Moreover, the spreading code can be integrated with the property of UWB, and achieve high system performance. The advantages of the proposed scheme are that administration and data transmissions won't affect each other and average packet delay can be reduced. Due to the short delay of this scheme and large bandwidth of UWB, this scheme is very suitable for real-time multimedia services.