On the Effect of Reflectance on Phasor Field Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging

Abstract

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging aims to visualize occluded scenes by exploiting indirect reflections on visible surfaces. Previous methods approach this problem by inverting the light transport on the hidden scene, but are limited to isolated, diffuse objects. The recently introduced phasor fields framework computationally poses NLOS reconstruction as a virtual line-of-sight (LOS) problem, lifting most assumptions about the hidden scene. In this work we complement recent theoretical analysis of phasor field-based reconstruction, by empirically analyzing the effect of reflectance of the hidden scenes on reconstruction. We experimentally study the reconstruction of hidden scenes composed of objects with increasingly specular materials. Then, we evaluate the effect of the virtual aperture size on the reconstruction, and establish connections between the effect of these two different dimensions on the results. We hope our analysis helps to characterize the imaging capabilities of this promising new framework, and foster new NLOS imaging modalities.