PCA-based real-time single-photon 3D imaging method

The single photon lidar (SPL) system can collect data within a wide range, which is widely used in multispectral depth imaging and underwater depth imaging. However, SPL systems are subject to solar noise and dark count returns, resulting in poor quality of image construction. Therefore, a high-efficiency 3D imaging technology is needed to improve the performance of the SPL system. To address this problem, this paper develops a new short-range single-photon three-dimensional imaging method with both high quality and low complexity. In this paper, we use a 400 × 100 SPAD detector and an 850 nm laser source composed of VCSEL array to reconstruct the 3D image of a target within 5 m. By applying principal component analysis (PCA), the complexity of the proposed method can be reduced by 20 times compared with existing algorithms without compromising imaging quality, making the proposed method a promising candidate to be applied to a wide range of fields such as consumer electronics.