Enhancing the imaging performance of single-photon array detection through freeform-surface-based light field modulation.

Authors

Weihao Shen, Zhiyuan Zhao, Haotong Ma, Shengyu Liu, Wuqiang Xu, Yingben Song, Yanda Gu, Hu Yang

Published in

Optics express. Volume 34. Issue 20. Pages 37320-37339. Oct 05, 2026.

Abstract

To address the bottlenecks of low optical efficiency and uneven illumination inherent to single-photon array LiDAR systems, this paper proposes a joint imaging framework combining freeform light field shaping via an orthogonal bidirectional iterative algorithm and total-variation (TV) regularized image reconstruction. The core optical contribution lies in a freeform lens design strategy based on orthogonal bidirectional iteration, which establishes a precise energy mapping between incident Gaussian beams and uniform lattice light fields matching GM-APD pixel layouts. This refractive reshaping converts raw Gaussian radiation into flat-top spot arrays with homogenized energy distribution. Numerical simulations verify that the proposed freeform modulation achieves an optical energy utilization of 89.1% and a light uniformity of 96.5%, fundamentally resolving the tradeoff between central pixel saturation and peripheral detection blind zones in array receivers. For photon-sparse, noise-contaminated raw echo data, a reconstruction workflow integrating maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and conventional TV regularization is adopted to suppress stochastic noise while preserving sharp object geometric edges. Nighttime field experiments targeting a scene at 22.4 m demonstrate that the mean absolute error (MAE) of depth reconstruction is reduced from 2.2373 m under unoptimized flood illumination to 0.3176 m with our freeform lattice illumination. The presented scheme fulfills the large field-of-view (FOV) requirement of array-based single-photon detection and yields remarkable imaging improvements under constraints of limited laser output power and compact optical packaging. This work delivers a feasible optical route for high-efficiency, long-range single-photon 3D imaging LiDAR.

PMID:
42839431
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 07 Oct 2026.

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