Amazing stuff! This could be a breakthrough!
"Researchers have designed a single-photon time-of-flight LiDAR system that can acquire a high-resolution 3D image of an object or scene up to 1 kilometer away. The new system could help enhance security, monitoring, and remote sensing by enabling detailed imaging even in challenging environmental conditions or when objects are obscured by foliage or camouflage netting. ..."
"Scientists have developed a detection system that could vastly improve the accuracy of human facial and activity recognition at long distances and through obstructions like fog, smoke or camouflage.
The researchers say their sensitive light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system can generate high-resolution three-dimensional images with double the efficiency of similar LiDAR systems being developed by other research groups, and at least 10 times better image resolution.
At 325 metres – the length of around three soccer pitches – researchers were able to 3D image the face of one of their co-authors in millimetre-scale detail. ..."
From the abstract:
"Single-photon time-of-flight light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a versatile technique for the measurement of absolute distances and for depth profiling. It has a wide variety of applications (e.g., land surveying, autonomous car navigation, underwater imaging) with the potential to achieve high-resolution three-dimensional images over long ranges when the key components of the measurement system are of a suitably high specification.
In this work, a novel, high-efficiency, and low timing jitter superconducting nanowire single-photon detector, in conjunction with a custom single-pixel scanning transceiver system, and the time-correlated single-photon counting technique, enable the acquisition of millimeter-scale resolution depth images of scenes at standoff distances of hundreds of meters. A 1550 nm wavelength fiber laser was coupled to the monostatic transceiver to provide the illumination.
The system was eye-safe with the maximum average optical output power being
for measurements of a scene at a standoff distance of 1 km.
The overall system instrumental response was approximately 13 ps full width half maximum. This enabled 1 mm depth features on a reference board and a human head to be clearly resolved when measured by the system in broad daylight at standoff distances of 45 and 325 m using per-pixel acquisition times of between 0.25 and 1 ms.
These high-resolution results demonstrate the enormous potential of such a system to acquire detailed depth and intensity images of scenes from long distances in daylight or darkness conditions. This could lead to step change improvements in applications such as facial and human activity recognition and the imaging of scenes through clutter and atmospheric obscurants."
3D imaging breakthrough could mean step change for security and defence applications (original news release)
Fig. 1. (a) Schematic diagram of the time-of-flight based depth imaging system. The fiber laser illumination source and the single-photon detector (SNSPD) are fiber-coupled to the transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) channels, respectively, of the custom-designed monostatic single-pixel scanning transceiver.
Fig. 4. Depth and intensity measurement of one of the co-authors (GGT) acquired in daylight at a standoff distance of 45 m using a per-pixel acquisition time of 1 ms and an average optical output power of approximately 200 µW illuminating each pixel.
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