Photon-counting passive 3D image sensing for reconstruction and recognition of partially occluded objects

In this paper, we discuss the reconstruction and the recognition of partially occluded objects using photon counting integral imaging (II). Irradiance scenes are numerically reconstructed for the reference target in three-dimensional (3D) space. Photon counting scenes are estimated for unknown input objects using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of Poisson parameter. We propose nonlinear matched filtering in 3D space to recognize partially occluded targets. The recognition performance is substantially improved from the nonlinear matched filtering of elemental images without 3D reconstruction. The discrimination capability is analyzed in terms of Fisher ratio (FR) and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves.