Near Field iToF LIDAR Depth Improvement from Limited Number of Shots
This addresses a hardware limitation for LiDAR systems, offering a more efficient solution, though it appears incremental compared to existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of depth ambiguity in indirect Time of Flight LiDARs by proposing methods to recover full depth range using fewer raw data samples from a single modulation frequency, reducing laser stress and power consumption.
Indirect Time of Flight LiDARs can indirectly calculate the scene's depth from the phase shift angle between transmitted and received laser signals with amplitudes modulated at a predefined frequency. Unfortunately, this method generates ambiguity in calculated depth when the phase shift angle value exceeds $2π$. Current state-of-the-art methods use raw samples generated using two distinct modulation frequencies to overcome this ambiguity problem. However, this comes at the cost of increasing laser components' stress and raising their temperature, which reduces their lifetime and increases power consumption. In our work, we study two different methods to recover the entire depth range of the LiDAR using fewer raw data sample shots from a single modulation frequency with the support of sensor's gray scale output to reduce the laser components' stress and power consumption.