Seeing Far in the Dark with Patterned Flash

Flash illumination is widely used in imaging under low-light environments. However, intensity falls off with propagation distance quadratically, which poses significant challenges for flash at a long distance. We propose new technique, named “patterned flash”, Patterned concentrates optical power into dot array. Compared the conventional uniform where signal overwhelmed by noise everywhere, patterned provides stronger signals sparsely distributed points across field of view to ensure those stand out from sensor noise. This enables post-processing resolve important objects and details. Additionally, projects texture onto scene, can be treated as structured light system depth perception. Given novel system, we develop joint image reconstruction estimation algorithm convolutional neural network. build hardware prototype test proposed technique on various scenes. The experimental results demonstrate that our has significantly better performance distances Our code data are publicly available. ( https://github.com/zhsun0357/Seeing-Far-in-the-Dark-with-Patterned-Flash ).