One-Phase Algorithm for Continuous Wave TOF Machine Vision Applications

During the last years, time-of-flight (TOF) sensors achieved a significant impact onto research fields in machine vision. In comparison to other common 3-D sensing devices, they combine the advantages of active sensors providing accurate distance measurements and camera-based systems recording a 2-D matrix at a high frame rate. In this paper, a new approach is presented which increases the range calculation time by a factor of four. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is well suited for real-time processing of the range images of continuous wave TOF cameras.