Joint Depth and Reflectivity Estimation using Single-Photon LiDAR
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
May 19, 2025
Abstract
Single-Photon Light Detection and Ranging (SP-LiDAR is emerging as a leading
technology for long-range, high-precision 3D vision tasks. In SP-LiDAR,
timestamps encode two complementary pieces of information: pulse travel time
(depth) and the number of photons reflected by the object (reflectivity).
Existing SP-LiDAR reconstruction methods typically recover depth and
reflectivity separately or sequentially use one modality to estimate the other.
Moreover, the conventional 3D histogram construction is effective mainly for
slow-moving or stationary scenes. In dynamic scenes, however, it is more
efficient and effective to directly process the timestamps. In this paper, we
introduce an estimation method to simultaneously recover both depth and
reflectivity in fast-moving scenes. We offer two contributions: (1) A
theoretical analysis demonstrating the mutual correlation between depth and
reflectivity and the conditions under which joint estimation becomes
beneficial. (2) A novel reconstruction method, "SPLiDER", which exploits the
shared information to enhance signal recovery. On both synthetic and real
SP-LiDAR data, our method outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior
joint reconstruction quality.
