Hongzhou Dong | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

SP-TransientBench: A Real-Captured Single Photon Perception Benchmark

Single-photon LiDAR (SPL) based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensing enables time-resolved photon measurements with extreme sensitivity, offering unique potential for active 3D perception in photon-starved scenarios.However, real-world single photon perception remains fundamentally challenging due to unique measurement noise and complex multi-return transient phenomena, which jointly complicate geometric reconstruction and semantic scene understanding. Despite growing interest in SPAD-based sensing, existing studies are largely limited to simulated data or small-scale controlled captures. As a result, systematic evaluation of real-world single photon perception across depth estimation, multi-view reconstruction, and 3D semantic understanding remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SP-TransientBench (STB), a real-captured multi-task benchmark for single photon perception. SP-TransientBenc comprises 10 diverse scenes and 10,297 views captured using a solid-state single-photon LiDAR at $256\times192$ resolution. Each view provides full time-of-flight histograms with multi-return behavior,standardized metadata, and calibrated camera poses for multi-view evaluation. We further provide 13-class 3D semantic annotations for selected scenes. By providing dedicated data splits and evaluation protocols for each task, STB enables consistent and reproducible benchmarking of real-world single photon perception across multiple 3D vision problems. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Toward Robust Single-Photon Perception for Robots: A Condition-Aware Active Learning Approach

LiDAR-based perception plays a fundamental role in modern robotic systems for environment understanding and navigation. Single-photon LiDAR (SPL) extends conventional LiDAR by enabling photon-efficient 3D sensing under challenging conditions such as long-range operation, low-albedo targets, and limited signal returns. However, developing SPL perception models for real-world robotic applications remains difficult because annotated SPL data are costly to obtain and model performance can vary substantially across imaging conditions. In this paper, we present the first active learning framework tailored to the SPL sensing modality rather than a specific downstream task. Our method introduces a physics-grounded, imaging condition-aware sampling strategy that uses synthetic SPL variants to characterize how candidate samples respond to changes in sensing conditions. By jointly modeling prediction uncertainty, sample diversity, and sensitivity to photon-level imaging variations, the proposed approach prioritizes samples that are informative for improving labeling efficiency and robustness. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world SPL datasets demonstrate that our method substantially reduces annotation requirements while maintaining strong performance across image-level and dense prediction settings. On synthetic data, our approach achieves 97% classification accuracy using only 1.5% labeled samples. On real-world data, it maintains 90% accuracy with 8.2% labeled samples, outperforming the strongest baseline by 6%. Segmentation results further show that the same condition-aware acquisition principle improves annotation efficiency and robustness across imaging conditions. These results establish a modality-aware active learning strategy for data-efficient SPL perception, with the potential to extend to a broader range of downstream tasks.

eess.IV↗