Recovering temporal PSF using ToF camera with delayed light emission

Abstract Recovering temporal point spread functions (PSFs) is important for various applications, especially analyzing light transport. Some methods that use amplitude-modulated continuous wave time-of-flight (ToF) cameras are proposed to recover temporal PSFs, where the resolution is several nanoseconds. Contrarily, we show in this paper that sub-nanosecond resolution can be achieved using pulsed ToF cameras and an additional circuit. A circuit is inserted before the illumination so that the emission delay can be controlled by sub-nanoseconds. From the observations of various delay settings, we recover temporal PSFs of the sub-nanosecond resolution. We confirm the effectiveness of our method via real-world experiments