3D camera based on linear-mode gain-modulated avalanche photodiodes

Abstract

In the last few years, both the scientific and industrial communities have shown an increasing interest in range imaging, due to its potential exploitation in various application domains such as robotics, security and surveillance, vehicle safety, gaming, and mobile applications. Among the diversity of techniques available for range detection, Time-of-Flight (ToF) offers advantages in terms of compact system realization, good performance, and low required computational power. The last works on ToF sensors, presenting demodulation sensors based on photon-mixing devices [1,2], and time-counting sensors based on single-photon avalanche diodes [3], have shown a trend towards higher resolutions, with a consequent reduction of pixel size, higher modulation frequencies, and demodulation contrast to allow better distance precision. © 2013 IEEE.