Virtually all current imaging methods rely on light traveling directly from the object to be imaged to the imaging device. Although direct, ballistic, single-bounce light components generally make up a large portion of the total light that is collected by an imaging system, there is a significant contribution from multi-bounce light. This light is scattered or reflected by surfaces in the scene multiple times on the path from light source to detector. Depending on the amount of scattering in the scene, the multi-bounce component can be significantly larger than the direct component, and is typically much more complex. Current imaging techniques aim to remove this information from the data to create images using the remaining ballistic-light component.Our imaging system recovers information in non-ballistic light, enabling objects that would be obscured in typical imaging systems to be detected.
