Passive non-line-of-sight imaging for moving targets with an event camera

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging is an emerging technique for detecting objects behind obstacles or around corners. Recent studies on passive NLOS mainly focus on steady-state measurement and reconstruction methods, which show limitations in recognition of moving targets. To the best of our knowledge, we propose a novel event-based passive NLOS imaging method. We acquire asynchronous event-based data of the diffusion spot on the relay surface, which contains detailed dynamic information of the NLOS target, and efficiently ease the degradation caused by target movement. In addition, we demonstrate the event-based cues based on the derivation of an event-NLOS forward model. Furthermore, we propose the first event-based NLOS imaging data set, EM-NLOS, and the movement feature is extracted by time-surface representation. We compare the reconstructions through event-based data with frame-based data. The event-based method performs well on peak signal-to-noise ratio and learned perceptual image patch similarity, which is 20% and 10% better than the frame-based method.