Abstract

Recent advances in materials, devices and fabrication technologies have led to an emerging class of solid-state sensors with single photon sensitivity. Thanks to their sub-nanosecond time resolution, and rapidly increasing spatial resolutions, these new single-photon sensors (SPS) have been a key enabling technology behind recent breakthroughs in several domains, including fluorescence-based bio-imaging, time-of-flight 3D computer vision, LIDAR, and astronomy. In this talk, I will present results in signal sampling and inference to address several challenges associated with the SPS. In particular, I will present our recent work on establishing the performance bounds of the SPS in acquiring light intensity fields; on time-sequential adaptive sensing schemes that allow one to push the imaging capabilities of SPS systems beyond the nominal limit imposed by current hardware; and on new image formation algorithms that can efficiently "decode" the massive bitstreams generated by the SPS.

© 2014 Optical Society of America