| Invited Talk

Name of the Speaker: Mr. Varun Sundar
Name of the Organizer: Dr. Kaushik Mitra
Venue: ESB-244 (Seminar Hall)
Date/Time: 3rd December 2024 (Tuesday), 3:00 PM
Title: Software-defined Single-Photon Imaging.

Abstract :

Reinterpretable cameras are defined by their post-capture capabilities that exceed traditional photography. In this talk, we take a look at reinterpretability at the level of individual photons: by detecting individual photons, we can computationally produce the functionality of several imaging systems. We devise simple transformations of photon detections that can emulate various imaging modalities—including exposure bracketing, flutter shutter cameras, video compressive cameras, event cameras, and trucking cameras---in a post-hoc manner. Our photon-level transformations offer the flexibility of being software-defined constructs that are only limited by what is computable, and shot noise. As a case study of this flexibility, we further show how photon detections can be transformed to realize a family of generalized event cameras that combine the efficiency of traditional event cameras with high-fidelity, high-speed intensity preservation. Consequently, generalized event cameras can support plug-and-play downstream inference, without capturing new event datasets or designing specialized event-vision models. On a practical note, our photon-level designs, which involve lightweight and near-sensor-compatible computations, provide a way to use single-photon sensors without exorbitant bandwidth and power costs.

Speaker Bio:

Varun Sundar is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science. At UW Madison, he is a part of the WISIONlab, headed by Prof. Mohit Gupta, where he focusses on single-photon imaging techniques. His work has been published at venues such as CVPR, ICCV, and SIGGRAPH, and has included live demos at ICCP 2023, CVPR 2024 and SIGGRAPH 2024 (which won the best-in-show award in the Emerging Technologies track). He previously received the bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2016.