Single-Photon Avalanche Diode-Based Detection and Imaging: Bringing the Photodiode Out of Its Comfort Zone

Our society is becoming more and more reliant on images, and we are getting used to having a visual representation of everything. However, our eyes are, in some ways, quite limited; they can see "just" colors and their intensity. What could we see if we were able to capture every piece of information that a single photon carries? Being able to measure, for example, the position, direction, wavelength, polarization, and time of arrival of every photon would give us the basis for having an almost fully complete understanding of the scene. Even though not all of these quantities need to be measured together, single-photon sensing can enable more and new dimensions to be added to the information space that we are gathering during an image acquisition.