Single-photon compressive imaging with some performance benefits over raster scanning

• We design a single photon imaging system with compressed sensing.
• A single point avalanche photodiode is used without raster scanning.
• The Poisson shot noise in the measurement is analyzed.
• The sensitivity of our system is proved to be higher than that of raster scanning.

A single-photon imaging system based on compressed sensing has been developed to image objects under ultra-low illumination. With this system, we have successfully realized imaging at the single-photon level with a single-pixel avalanche photodiode without point-by-point raster scanning. From analysis of the signal-to-noise ratio in the measurement we find that our system has much higher sensitivity than conventional ones based on point-by-point raster scanning, while the measurement time is also reduced.