Macroscopic interferometry: rethinking depth estimation with frequency-domain time-of-flight

Abstract

A form of meter-scale, macroscopic interferometry is proposed using conventional time-of-flight (ToF) sensors. Today, ToF sensors use phase-based sampling, where the phase delay between emitted and received, high-frequency signals encodes distance. This paper examines an alternative ToF architecture, inspired by micron-scale, microscopic interferometry, that relies only on frequency sampling: we refer to our proposed macroscopic technique as Frequency-Domain Time of Flight (FD-ToF). The proposed architecture offers several benefits over existing phase ToF systems, such as robustness to phase wrapping and implicit resolution of multi-path interference, all while capturing the same number of subframes. A prototype camera is constructed to demonstrate macroscopic interferometry at meter scale. ©2016