Exploiting wavelength diversity for high resolution time-of-flight 3D imaging

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel ToF 3D imaging sensor that uses wavelength diversity to achieve high depth resolution and dense point clouds, overcoming limitations of existing methods.

Contribution

Introduces a new sensor concept leveraging wavelength diversity for high-resolution ToF 3D imaging with three prototype implementations.

Findings

Depth precision up to 35 micrometers

Point cloud densities matching CMOS/CCD resolutions

Effective surface measurement of rough or specular objects

Abstract

State-of-the-art time-of-flight (ToF) based 3D sensors suffer from poor lateral and depth resolutions. In this work, we introduce a novel sensor concept that provides ToF-based 3D measurements of real world objects with depth precisions up to 35 micrometers and point cloud densities at the native sensor-resolutions of state-of-the-art CMOS/CCD cameras (up to several megapixels). Unlike other continuous-wave amplitude-modulated ToF principles, our approach exploits wavelength diversity for an interferometric surface measurement of macroscopic objects with rough or specular surfaces. Based on this principle, we introduce three different embodiments of prototype sensors, exploiting three different sensor architectures.