Practical Imaging and Inversion of Transient Light Transport

Descripción del proyecto

Una nueva técnica de imagenología por ecos ópticos con fines prácticos

La imagenología transitoria (TI, por sus siglas en inglés) está revolucionando el mercado de la infografía y la visión artificial. Gracias a esta tecnología, es posible detectar objetos a través de datos en el dominio temporal a una resolución de picosegundos y nanosegundos, así como capturar, reconstruir y simular el transporte de la luz. Esto permite mostrar películas de luz en movimiento, ver detrás de esquinas, detectar objetos en material multimedia muy disperso o deducir las propiedades de un material a distancia. Sin embargo, debido a la alta calidad de las medidas necesarias para su implementación, la TI solo se ha utilizado en laboratorios. El proyecto ECHO, financiado con fondos europeos, tiene el objetivo de desarrollar un nuevo sistema de cámaras mediante la introducción de la TI computacional (CTI, por sus siglas en inglés). Este tipo de imagenología permitirá a los investigadores distinguir y explorar los ecos ópticos de objetos mediante la captura ligera de datos transitorios en tiempo real, lo que aportará muchas tecnologías avanzadas y facilitará el desarrollo de muchas aplicaciones.

Objetivo

The automated analysis of visual data is a key enabler for industrial and consumer technologies and of immense economic
and social importance. Its main challenge is in the inherent ambiguity of images due to the very mechanism of image
capture: light reaching a pixel on different paths or at different times is mixed irreversibly. Consequently, even after
decades of extensive research, problems like deblurring or descattering, geometry/material estimation or motion tracking
are still largely unsolved and will remain so in the foreseeable future.
Transient imaging (TI) tackles this problem by recording ultrafast optical echoes that unmix light contributions by the total
pathlength. So far, TI used to require high-end measurement setups. By introducing computational TI (CTI), we paved the
way for a lightweight capture of transient data using consumer hardware. We showed the potential of CTI in scenarios like
robust range measurement, descattering and imaging of objects outside the line of sight – tasks that had been considered
difficult to impossible so far.
The ECHO project is rooted in computer graphics and computational imaging. In it, we will overcome the practical limitations that are hampering a large-scale deployment of TI: the time required for data capture and to reconstruct the
desired information, both in the order of seconds to minutes, a lack of dedicated image priors and of quality guarantees for
the reconstruction, the limited accuracy and performance of forward models and the lack of ground-truth data and
benchmark methods.
Over the course of ECHO, we will pioneer advanced capture setups and strategies, signal formation models, priors and numerical
methods, for the first time enabling real-time reconstruction and analysis of transient light transport in complex and dynamic
scenes. The methodology developed in this far-reaching project will turn TI from a research technology into a family of
practical tools that will immediately benefit many applications.