Mian Wei
PhD Candidate
University of Toronto
Monday, May 13
3:30 pm to 4:30 pm
3305 Newell-Simon Hall
3:30 pm to 4:30 pm
3305 Newell-Simon Hall
Passive Ultra-Wideband Single-Photon Imaging
Abstract: High-speed light sources, fast cameras, and depth sensors have made it possible to image dynamic phenomena occurring in ever smaller time intervals with the help of actively-controlled light sources and synchronization. Unfortunately, while these techniques do capture ultrafast events, they cannot simultaneously capture slower ones too. I will discuss our recent work on passive ultra-wideband single-photon imaging, where we consider the problem of imaging a dynamic scene over an extreme range of timescales simultaneously from seconds to picoseconds completely passively, without any light sources under our control, no synchronization, and not much light. We call this new imaging regime passive ultra-wideband imaging and show that this regime enables post capture refocusing in time—from transient to everyday timescales and can be captured using single-photon cameras. We show the potential of passive ultra-wideband imaging by experimentally demonstrating several never-seen-before abilities, including recording ultra-wideband video, which can be played back later at 30 Hz to show everyday motions—but can also be played a billion times slower to show the propagation of light itself.
Bio: Mian Wei (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Dynamic Graphics Projects (DGP) lab under Kyros Kutulakos at the University of Toronto. He received his MSc and BSc from the University of Toronto. His work focuses on single-photon imaging and computational imaging. He is the recipient of the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Doctoral Scholarship and his recent work on single-photon imaging recently received the Best Paper (Marr Prize) at ICCV 2023. Disclaimer: the photo is a bit outdated.
Sponsored in part by: Meta Reality Labs Pittsburgh