Non-Line-of-Sight Reconstruction using Efficient Transient Rendering

Abstract: Being able to see beyond the direct line of sight is an intriguing prospective and could benefit a wide variety of important applications. Recent work has demonstrated that time-resolved measurements of indirect diffuse light contain valuable information for reconstructing shape and reflectance properties of objects located around a corner. In this paper, we introduce a novel reconstruction scheme that, by design, produces solutions that are consistent with state-of-the-art physically-based rendering. Our method combines an efficient forward model (a custom renderer for time-resolved three-bounce indirect light transport) with an optimization framework to reconstruct object geometry in an analysis-by-synthesis sense. We evaluate our algorithm on a variety of synthetic and experimental input data, and show that it gracefully handles uncooperative scenes with high levels of noise or non-diffuse material reflectance.