Stochastic Exposure Coding for Handling Multi-ToF-Camera Interference

Abstract

As continuous-wave time-of-flight (C-ToF) cameras become popular in 3D imaging applications, they need to contend with the problem of multi-camera interference (MCI). In a multi-camera environment, a ToF camera may receive light from the sources of other cameras, resulting in large depth errors. In this paper, we propose stochastic exposure coding (SEC), a novel approach for mitigating. SEC involves dividing a camera's integration time into multiple slots, and switching the camera off and on stochastically during each slot. This approach has two benefits. First, by appropriately choosing the on probability for each slot, the camera can effectively filter out both the AC and DC components of interfering signals, thereby mitigating depth errors while also maintaining high signal-to-noise ratio. This enables high accuracy depth recovery with low power consumption. Second, this approach can be implemented without modifying the C-ToF camera's coding functions, and thus, can be used with a wide range of cameras with minimal changes. We demonstrate the performance benefits of SEC with theoretical analysis, simulations and real experiments, across a wide range of imaging scenarios.