SpiderCam: Low-Power Snapshot Depth from Differential Defocus

TL;DR

SpiderCam is a low-power FPGA-based camera that captures real-time depth maps using differential defocus, achieving high efficiency and low power consumption for 3D imaging.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel low-power FPGA implementation of differential defocus for real-time depth sensing with significant power efficiency improvements.

Findings

Produces 480x400 depth maps at 32.5 FPS

Consumes only 624 mW total power

First sub-Watt FPGA-based 3D camera reported

Abstract

We introduce SpiderCam, an FPGA-based snapshot depth-from-defocus camera which produces 480x400 sparse depth maps in real-time at 32.5 FPS over a working range of 52 cm while consuming 624 mW of power in total. SpiderCam comprises a custom camera that simultaneously captures two differently focused images of the same scene, processed with a SystemVerilog implementation of depth from differential defocus (DfDD) on a low-power FPGA. To achieve state-of-the-art power consumption, we present algorithmic improvements to DfDD that overcome challenges caused by low-power sensors, and design a memory-local implementation for streaming depth computation on a device that is too small to store even a single image pair. We report the first sub-Watt total power measurement for passive FPGA-based 3D cameras in the literature.