Dr. Vivek Goyal of Boston University

Abstract: LIDAR systems use single-photon detectors to enable long-range reflectivity and depth imaging.
By exploiting an inhomogeneous Poisson process observation model and the typical structure of natural
scenes, first-photon imaging demonstrates the possibility of accurate LIDAR with only 1 detected photon
per pixel, where half of the detections are due to (uninformative) ambient light. I will explain the simple
ideas behind first-photon imaging. Then I will touch upon related subsequent works that mitigate the
limitations of detector arrays, withstand 25-times more ambient light, allow for unknown ambient light
levels, and capture multiple depths per pixel. The philosophy of modeling at the level of individual
particles is also at the root of current work in scanned ion beam microscopy.
Related paper DOIs:
10.1126/science.1246775
10.1109/TSP.2015.2453093
10.1109/LSP.2015.2475274
10.1364/OE.24.001873
10.1038/ncomms12046
10.1109/TSP.2017.2706028.

Biography:

Biography: Vivek Goyal received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University
of California, Berkeley, where he received the Eliahu Jury Award for outstanding achievement in systems,
communications, control, or signal processing. He was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories,
a Senior Research Engineer for Digital Fountain, and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor
of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He was an adviser to 3dim Tech, winner of the 2013 MIT $100K
Entrepreneurship Competition Launch Contest Grand Prize, and consequently with Nest Labs 2014-2016.
He is now an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University.
Dr. Goyal is a Fellow of the IEEE. He was awarded the 2002 IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS)
Magazine Award, the 2017 IEEE SPS Best Paper Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and the Best Paper Award
at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. Work he supervised won student best
paper awards at the IEEE Data Compression Conference in 2006 and 2011 and the IEEE Sensor Array and
Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop in 2012 as well as the Best Poster Award at the IEEE
International Conference on Computational Photography and five MIT thesis awards. He currently serves
on the Editorial Board of Foundations and Trends and Signal Processing, the IEEE SPS Computational
Imaging SIG, and the IEEE SPS Industry DSP TC. He previously served on the Scientific Advisory Board of
the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery, as Technical
Program Committee Co-chair of Sampling Theory and Applications 2015, and as Conference Co-chair of
the SPIE Wavelets and Sparsity conference series 2006-2016. He is a co-author of Foundations of Signal
Processing (Cambridge University Press, 2014

Address:Boston University, Maine, United States