Passive imaging of single photon flux: strategies for de-noising, motion blur reduction and super-resolution up-scaling

Single photon-counting avalanche photo-diode (SPAD) can measure the photon flux from uncorrelated single photons. In present work, we show how the sensor photon count rate is related to the intensity or the radiant flux that is reflected from surfaces in the sensor's field of view and incident on the sensor array. After a brief theoretical discussion of photon flux imaging, we examine various de-noising strategies and the effect of motion blur. Finally, we present the application of a fast super-resolution neural network (FSRCNN) to scale image by a scaling factor of 3× to obtain super-resolution images (32 × 32 → 96 × 96).