Multireturn compressed gated range imaging

Active range imaging (RI) systems utilize actively controlled light sources emitting laser pulses that are subsequently recorded by an imaging system and used for depth profile estimation. Classical RI systems are limited by their need for a large number of frames required to obtain high resolution depth information. In this work, we propose an RI approach motivated by the recently proposed compressed sensing framework to dramatically reduce the number of necessary frames. Compressed gated range sensing employs a random gating mechanism along with state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms for the estimation of the timing of the reflected pulses and the inference of distances. In addition to efficiency, the proposed scheme is also able to identify multiple reflected pulses that can be introduced by semi-transparent elements in the scene such as clouds, smoke, and foliage. Simulations under highly realistic conditions demonstrate that the proposed architecture is capable of accurately recovering the depth profile of a scene from as few as 10 frames at 100 depth bins resolution, even under very challenging conditions. The results further indicate that the proposed architecture is able to extract multiple reflected pulses with a minimal increase in the number of frames, in situations where state-of-the-art methods fail to accurately estimate the correct depth signals. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. [DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.54.3.031106]