Phasor field waves: A Huygens-like light transport model for non-line-of-sight imaging applications

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging has recently attracted a lot of interest from the scientific community. The goal of this paper is to provide the basis for a comprehensive mathematical framework for NLOS imaging that is directly derived from physical concepts. We introduce the irradiance phasor field (P-field) as an abstract quantity for irradiance fluctuations, akin to the complex envelope of the Electrical field (E-field) that is used to describe propagation of electromagnetic energy. We demonstrate that the P-field propagator is analogous to the Huygens-Fresnel propagator that describes the propagation of other waves and show that NLOS light transport can be described with the processing methods that are available for LOS imaging. We perform simulations to demonstrate the accuracy and validity of the P-field formulation and provide experimental results to demonstrate a Huygens-like P-field summation behavior.