Understanding Indirect Time-of-Flight Depth Sensing

Re:Understanding Indirect Time-of-Flight Depth Sensing by stefan_ on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @06:34AM (#26872874)

The article is also a bit optimistic in regards to outdoors use, with direct sunlight exposure. The sensors I tested in the past just didn't work at all.

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Re:Understanding Indirect Time-of-Flight Depth Sensing by rzw2 on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @12:28PM (#26876871)

There are two issues with sunlight and iToF. The sunlight photons saturate the pixel, and you get no useful measurement. The dominant noise source of iToF is photon shot noise [1], so sunlight photons contribute heavily to noise. Increase your laser power, use better optical notch filters, decrease the sensor integration time, and do more image filtering. I'm a cofounder at Chronoptics and we've developed a sunlight capable ToF camera, https://youtu.be/7vMI37S0w3Q

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise

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Re:Understanding Indirect Time-of-Flight Depth Sensing by cpgxiii on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @10:21AM (#26875038)

You can absolutely make ToF sensors work outdoors in direct sunlight, but you need to operate at different frequencies that require more expensive emitters and detectors to avoid being saturated by light from the sun.

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Re:Understanding Indirect Time-of-Flight Depth Sensing by hairytrog on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @10:32AM (#26875186)

Which sensor was that stefan_? maybe I worked on it

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