Reconstructing rooms using photon echoes: A plane based model and reconstruction algorithm for looking around the corner

Adithya Kumar Pediredla, Mauro Buttafava, Alberto Tosi, Oliver Strides Cossairt, Ashok Veeraraghavan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

37 Scopus citations

Abstract

Can we reconstruct the entire internal shape of a room if all we can directly observe is a small portion of one internal wall, presumably through a window in the room? While conventional wisdom may indicate that this is not possible, motivated by recent work on 'looking around corners', we show that one can exploit light echoes to reconstruct the internal shape of hidden rooms. Existing techniques for looking around the corner using transient images model the hidden volume using voxels and try to explain the captured transient response as the sum of the transient responses obtained from individual voxels. Such a technique inherently suffers from challenges with regards to low signal to background ratios (SBR) and has difficulty scaling to larger volumes. In contrast, in this paper, we argue for using a plane-based model for the hidden surfaces. We demonstrate that such a plane-based model results in much higher SBR while simultaneously being amenable to larger spatial scales. We build an experimental prototype composed of a pulsed laser source and a single-photon avalanche detector (SPAD) that can achieve a time resolution of about 30ps and demonstrate high-fidelity reconstructions both of individual planes in a hidden volume and for reconstructing entire polygonal rooms composed of multiple planar walls.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2017 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781509057450
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 16 2017
Event2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2017 - Stanford, United States
Duration: May 12 2017May 14 2017

Publication series

Name2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2017 - Proceedings

Other

Other2017 IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography, ICCP 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityStanford
Period5/12/175/14/17

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Instrumentation
  • Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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