Fusion of Time-of-Flight and Phase Shifting for high-resolution and low-latency depth sensing

Abstract

Depth sensors based on Time-of-Flight (ToF) and Phase Shifting (PS) have complementary strengths and weaknesses. ToF can provide real-time depth but limited in resolution and sensitive to noise. PS can generate accurate and robust depth with high resolution but requires a number of patterns that leads to high latency. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion framework to take advantages of both ToF and PS. The basic idea is using the coarse depth from ToF to disambiguate the wrapped depth from PS. Specifically, we address two key technical problems: cross-modal calibration and interference-free synchronization between ToF and PS sensors. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method generates accurate and robust depth with high resolution and low latency, which is beneficial to tremendous applications.