Stereoscopic photon counting passive sensing for extraction of distance information

摘要

Photon-counting sensing has been widely used in low-light level imaging applications. Photon-counting images can be processed in a simpler and faster manner especially when the binary photon numbers are considered. In this paper, a distance extraction method with stereoscopic photon-counting passive sensing is proposed. Distance extraction is carried out with a stereoscopic photon counting image pair. Nonlinear correlation obtains horizontal discrepancy that maximizes the similarity between two rectified photon-counting images. Computer experiments confirm that the proposed method can extract distance information to an object under low-light level conditions. Performance is evaluated by mean and variance of distance obtained with varying expected number of photons in the scene.