Signal Processing Approaches for Jitter Extraction in Time-of-Flight Range Imaging Cameras

The precision and accuracy of time-of-flight full-field range cameras are important for many applications, however there are a number of noise sources that degrade both precision and accuracy. Many of the noise sources such as nonlinearity, multipath inferences and harmonic cancellation are well investigated. Barely investigated is jitter on the camera light and shutter signals. Here we measure periodic and random jitter on the light signal of a camera. We use signal processing techniques to construct a reference signal, hence find the jitter. The performance of the proposed method is examined using the MESA Imaging SwissRanger 4000. We found periodic jitter of two frequencies at 0.12 and 5.04 MHz and the random jitter of 164 ± 4 ps, on the light signal of the camera.