{"ID":2895491,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09386","arxiv_id":"2507.09386","title":"Free-running vs. Synchronous: Single-Photon Lidar for High-flux 3D Imaging","abstract":"Conventional wisdom suggests that single-photon lidar (SPL) should operate in low-light conditions to minimize dead-time effects. Many methods have been developed to mitigate these effects in synchronous SPL systems. However, solutions for free-running SPL remain limited despite the advantage of reduced histogram distortion from dead times. To improve the accuracy of free-running SPL, we propose a computationally efficient joint maximum likelihood estimator of the signal flux, the background flux, and the depth using only histograms, along with a complementary regularization framework that incorporates a learned point cloud score model as a prior. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that free-running SPL yields lower estimation errors than its synchronous counterpart under identical conditions, with our regularization further improving accuracy.","short_abstract":"Conventional wisdom suggests that single-photon lidar (SPL) should operate in low-light conditions to minimize dead-time effects. Many methods have been developed to mitigate these effects in synchronous SPL systems. However, solutions for free-running SPL remain limited despite the advantage of reduced histogram disto...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09386","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09386v1","authors":"[\"Ruangrawee Kitichotkul\",\"Shashwath Bharadwaj\",\"Joshua Rapp\",\"Yanting Ma\",\"Alexander Mehta\",\"Vivek K Goyal\"]","published":"2025-07-12T20:06:00Z","proceeding":"eess.SP","tasks":"[\"eess.SP\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}