A Laser Time-of-Flight Range Scanner for Robotic Vision

Using Time-of-Flight Measurements for Privacy-Preserving Tracking in a Smart Room

“…Time-offlight approaches have the advantage of quick, straightforward information processing [3], and offer reasonably accurate lowresolution depth images at video frame rates, which can be quite useful for surveillance and human-machine interaction applications. On the other hand, compared to direct depth sensing technologies such as LiDAR, time-of-flight cameras have less accuracy, may work poorly outdoors or at very close range, and typically exhibit a systematic distance error [4].…”

“…In this paper, we propose to use ceiling-mounted, downward-pointed time-of-flight (ToF) sensors [3] to estimate human occupancy and pose in real time. The idea is to mount a sparse array of single-pixel range sensors on the ceiling of a room, which can detect the height of any object under them, as illustrated in Figure 1.…”

Active Optical Range Imaging Sensors

“…It took about 40 seconds to obtain 64 x 64 range images (M= 1,520). Jarvis [1983a] built a similar sensor capable of acquiring a 64 x 64 range image with ±2.5 mm range resolution over a 4-m field of view in 40 seconds (M= 16,160). Heikkinen et al [1986] and Ahola et al [1985] developed a pulsed timeof-flight range sensor with a depth of field of 1.5 meters at a standoff of- 2.5 meters.…”

From surfaces to objects: computer vision and three dimensional scene analysis

“…[122,98,143]) computes surface depth by measuring time of flight of a laser pulse or by signal phase shift caused by path length differences. The laser is scanned over the entire scene, producing a depth image.…”