Abstract

Traditionally, two dimensional imaging systems have been the dominant method of sensing and visualizing the world and to perform various information dependent tasks. Stereoscopic imaging and display provides 3D cues to some extent but is limited to fixed viewpoint capture and reconstruction.

In this seminar, we present an overview of advances in 3D imaging, visualization, and display. In addition, we discuss performing 3D imaging with few photons. The integration of passive three-dimensional (3D) integral imaging and photon-counting sensing presents many novel applications, including imaging through obscurations and very low light level imaging. We show that it is possible to perform complex tasks such as 3D visualization and 3D object recognition with substantially fewer photons than conventional imaging. 3D object recognition can require a large number of pixels to be gathered to provide reliable recognition. In photon-counting 3D imaging, we find that reliable pattern recognition can be obtained with very few pixels generating photo-counts. Photon-counting 3D imaging experiments will be presented to verify the theoretical predictions.