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research article

Predicting Important Photons for Energy-Efficient Single-Photon Videography

Koerner, Lucas J.
•
Bruschini, Claudio  
•
Charbon, Edoardo  
2025
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) detect individual photons with fine temporal resolutions, enabling capabilities like imaging in near-total darkness, extreme dynamic range, and rapid motion. Due to these capabilities, and coupled with the recent emergence of high-resolution (> 1MP) arrays, SPADs have the potential to become workhorses for computer vision systems of the future that need to operate in a wide range of challenging conditions. However, SPADs' sensitivity comes at a high energy cost due to the underlying avalanche process, which consumes substantial energy per detected photon, limiting the scalability and practicality of high-resolution SPAD arrays. To address this, we propose approaches to predict and sample only the most salient photons for a given vision task. To this end, we design computationally lightweight photon-sampling strategies that allocate energy resources for detecting photons only in areas with significant motion and spatial variation, while continually adapting to changing signals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in recovering comparable video to a fully-sampled SPAD capture using only a small fraction of the photons (up to 10× fewer), across diverse real-world scenes with motion, high dynamic range, and varying light conditions.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/TPAMI.2025.3598767
Scopus ID

2-s2.0-105013377548

Author(s)
Koerner, Lucas J.

University of St. Thomas, Minnesota

Bruschini, Claudio  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Charbon, Edoardo  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025

Published in
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Subjects

Computational Photography

•

Practical Single-Photon Imaging

•

Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
AQUA  
Available on Infoscience
August 25, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/253469
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