Recovering three-dimensional shape around a corner using ultrafast time-of-flight imaging

• Published in: Nature communications 2012-03, Vol.3 (1), p.745-745, Article 745
• Main Authors: Velten, Andreas, Willwacher, Thomas, Gupta, Otkrist, Veeraraghavan, Ashok, Bawendi, Moungi G., Raskar, Ramesh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 639/624/1075; 639/624/1107/510; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1747

The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination of a time-of-flight technique and computational reconstruction algorithms to untangle image information mixed by diffuse reflection. We demonstrate a three-dimensional range camera able to look around a corner using diffusely reflected light that achieves sub-millimetre depth precision and centimetre lateral precision over 40 cm×40 cm×40 cm of hidden space. An important goal in optics is to image objects hidden by turbid media, although line-of-sight techniques fail when the obscuring medium becomes opaque. Velten et al . use ultrafast imaging techniques to recover three-dimensional shapes of non-line-of-sight objects after reflection from diffuse surfaces.