Centimeter-Wave Free-Space Time-of-Flight Imaging
Seung-Hwan Baek, Noah Walsh, Ilya Chugunov, Zheng Shi, Felix Heide

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel optical ToF imaging method that achieves micron-scale depth resolution in free-space, overcoming previous limitations by combining GHz modulation, dual-pass frequency doubling, and neural phase unwrapping.
Contribution
It presents a new all-optical modulation and computational phase unwrapping approach that significantly improves depth precision and robustness over existing ToF methods.
Findings
Achieves micron-scale depth resolution in free-space imaging.
Outperforms existing analog demodulation methods across various scenarios.
Demonstrates robustness to surface reflectance and ambient light.
Abstract
Depth cameras are emerging as a cornerstone modality with diverse applications that directly or indirectly rely on measured depth, including personal devices, robotics, and self-driving vehicles. Although time-of-flight (ToF) methods have fueled these applications, the precision and robustness of ToF methods is limited by relying on photon time-tagging or modulation after photo-conversion. Successful optical modulation approaches have been restricted fiber-coupled modulation with large coupling losses or interferometric modulation with sub-cm range, and the precision gap between interferometric methods and ToF methods is more than three orders of magnitudes. In this work, we close this gap and propose a computational imaging method for all-optical free-space correlation before photo-conversion that achieves micron-scale depth resolution with robustness to surface reflectance and ambient…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Optical Sensing Technologies · Optical measurement and interference techniques · Optical Coherence Tomography Applications
