Three-dimensional photon counting integral imaging reconstruction using penalized maximum likelihood expectation maximization

Recent works have demonstrated that three-dimensional (3D) object reconstruction is possible from integral images captured in severely photon starved conditions. In this paper we propose an iterative approach to implement a maximum likelihood expectation maximization estimator with several types of regularization for 3D reconstruction from photon counting integral images. We show that the proposed algorithms outperform the previously reported approaches for photon counting 3D integral imaging reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on using iterative statistical reconstruction techniques for 3D photon counting integral imaging.