A Simulation Framework for Time-Of-Flight Sensors

Modern time-of-flight (TOF) cameras enable the measurement of full-range distance information in real time. The distance information can be calculated by estimating the elapsed time between the emission and the receiving of active light. The simulation of sensors is an essential building block for hardware design and application development. Thus, expensive prototypes can be omitted and down-stream algorithms, e.g. for sensor calibration and sensor data processing, can be tested. This paper deals with the simulation of camera-like time-of-flight sensors and focuses particularly on the manipulation of camera parameters and the generation of synthetic sensor data in real-time. The sensor framework provides tools for object and camera manipulation as well as animation. All relevant parameters for the camera-like sensor, object appearance and per-pixel sensor information are available to the TOF-sensor simulation unit (SSU), which realizes the specific sensor characteristics. Moreover, we present a first concept of the simulation of photonic mixing device (PMD) sensors. The framework is hardware accelerated to allow for interactive simulator feedback, making use of the programmability of modern graphics processing units (GPUs), i.e., of vertex and fragment programs.