Photon-counting 3D integral imaging with less than a single photon per pixel on average using a statistical model of the EM-CCD camera

We investigate photon-counting 3D integral imaging (PCII) with an electron multiplying charged-coupled device (EM-CCD) camera using dedicated statistical models. Using conventional integral imaging reconstruction methods with this camera in photon-counting conditions may result in degraded reconstructed image quality if multiple photons are detected simultaneously in a given pixel. We propose an estimation method derived from the photon detection statistical model of the EM-CCD to address the problems caused by multiple photons detected at the same pixel and provide improved 3D reconstructions. We also present a simplified version of this statistical method that can be used under the correct conditions. The imaging performance of these methods is evaluated on experimental data by the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the structural similarity index measure. The experiments demonstrate that 3D integral imaging substantially outperforms 2D imaging in degraded conditions. Furthermore, we achieve imaging in photon-counting conditions where, on average, less than a single photon per pixel is detected by the camera. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of PCII with the EM-CCD camera employing its statistical model in 3D reconstruction of PCII.