Photon-limited time of flight depth acquisition : new parametric model and its analysis

Abstract

As 3-D imaging systems become more popular, the depth estimation which is their core component should be made as accurate as possible at low power levels. In this thesis, we consider the time of flight depth acquisition problem at low photon counts. We first formulate the received light intensity at the photodetector as the convolution of the source intensity and another signal which we call the scene impulse response. We then present a new framework to calculate the scene impulse response given the scene depth. Using that framework, we propose a richer parametric model than the model being used in existing technologies. We use the maximum likelihood algorithm with our proposed model on simulated data to estimate the depth parameters of the scene. The simulation results show a uniformly better performance for our model relative to the conventional model.