Active Range Imaging (ARI) has recently sparked an enthusiastic interest due to the numerous applications that can benefit from the high quality depth maps that ARI systems offer. One of the most successful ARI techniques employs Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras which emit and subsequently record laser pulses in order to estimate the distance between the camera and objects in a scene. A limitation of this type of ARI is the requirement for a large number of frames that have to be captured in order to generate high resolution depth maps. In this work, we introduce Compressed Gated Range Sensing (CGRS), a novel approach for ToF-based ARI that utilizes the recently proposed framework of Compressed Sensing (CS) to dramatically reduce the number of necessary frames. The CGRS technique employs a random gating function along with state-of-the-art reconstruction in order to estimate the timing of a returning laser pulse and infer the depth map. To validate our method, software simulations were carried out using a realistic system model. Simulated results suggest that low error reconstruction of a depth map is possible using approximately 20% of the frames that traditional ToF cameras require, while 30% sampling rates can achieve very high fidelity reconstruction.

Date Published: 26 September 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8858, Wavelets and Sparsity XV, 88581B (26 September 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2023901

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8858:
Wavelets and Sparsity XV
Dimitri Van De Ville; Vivek K. Goyal; Manos Papadakis, Editor(s)