The Geometry of First-Returning Photons for Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging utilizes the full 5D light transient measurements to reconstruct scenes beyond the cameras field of view. Mathematically, this requires solving an elliptical tomography problem that unmixes the shape and albedo from spatially-multiplexed measurements of the NLOS scene. In this paper, we propose a new approach for NLOS imaging by studying the properties of first-returning photons from three-bounce light paths. We show that the times of flight of first-returning photons are dependent only on the geometry of the NLOS scene and each observation is almost always generated from a single NLOS scene point. Exploiting these properties, we derive a space carving algorithm for NLOS scenes. In addition, by assuming local planarity, we derive an algorithm to localize NLOS scene points in 3D and estimate their surface normals. Our methods do not require either the full transient measurements or solving the hard elliptical tomography problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods through simulations as well as real data captured from a SPAD sensor.