Coded aperture compressive 3-D LIDAR

Continuous improvement in optical sensing components, as well as recent advances in signal acquisition theory provide a great opportunity to reduce the cost and enhance the capabilities of depth sensing systems. In this paper we propose a new depth sensing architecture that exploits a fixed coded aperture to significantly reduce the number of sensors compared to conventional systems. We further develop a modeling and reconstruction framework, based on model-based compressed sensing, which characterizes a large variety of depth sensing systems. Our experiments demonstrate that it is possible to reduce the number of sensors by more than 85%, with negligible reduction on the sensing quality.