Advanced Optical Sensing Technologies

Advanced optical sensing technologies use precisely timed pulses of light—often from lasers—to measure how long photons take to travel to a surface and back, reconstructing the geometry of a scene in three dimensions with centimeter or even millimeter precision. Instruments ranging from lidar systems mounted on autonomous vehicles to single-photon-sensitive CMOS sensors in compact range cameras have made this timing approach practical across scales from planetary distances down to handheld devices. Researchers are actively pushing the limits of detection sensitivity, working to image objects around corners or through scattering media by recovering photons that have taken indirect paths—a problem known as non-line-of-sight imaging. Open challenges include reducing noise in photon-counting detectors operating under bright ambient light, compressing the data volumes generated by dense 3D point clouds, and miniaturizing high-performance systems without sacrificing depth accuracy.

Works

62,794

Total citations

297,440

Keywords

Time-of-FlightLaser RangingSingle-Photon Detection3D ImagingRange CameraLidar