ADI Proposes ToF Baby Monitor Camera, Compares cwToF and pToF Approaches

Arrow and Analog Devices propose to use its ToF camera solution in baby monitors:

ADI also publishes a nice article dated by Dec 2019 and summarizing the company's experience with continuous wave and pulsed ToF systems:

Advantages of Continuous-Wave Systems:

• For applications that do not have high precision requirements, a CW system may be easier to implement than a pulse-based system in that the light source does not have to be extremely short, with fast rising/falling edges, though it is difficult to reproduce a perfect sinusoidal wave in practice. However, if precision requirements become more stringent, higher frequency modulation signals will become necessary and may be difficult to implement in practice.
• Due to the periodicity of the illumination signal, any phase measurement from a CW system measurement will wrap around every 2π, meaning that there will be an aliasing distance. For a system with only one modulation frequency, the aliasing distance will also be the maximum measurable distance. To counteract this limitation, multiple modulation frequencies can be used to perform phase unwrapping, wherein the true distance of an object can be determined if two (or more) phase measurements with different modulation frequencies agree on the estimated distance. This multiple modulation frequency scheme can also be useful in reducing multipath error, which occurs when the reflected light from an object hits another object (or reflects internally within the lens) before returning to the sensor, resulting in measurement errors.
• Depending on their configuration, CMOS ToF imagers tend to have more flexibility and faster readout speed, so functions such as region-of-interest (RoI) output are possible.
• Calibrating a CW ToF system over temperature may be easier than that of a pulsed ToF system. As the temperature of a system increases, the demodulation signal and the illumination will shift with respect to each other because of the temperature variation, but this shift will only affect the measured distance with an offset error that is constant over the entire range, with the depth linearity remaining essentially stable.

Disadvantages of Continuous-Wave Systems:

• Though CMOS sensors have higher output data rates compared to that of other sensors, CW sensors require four samples of the correlation function at multiple modulation frequencies, as well as multiframe processing, to calculate depth. The longer exposure time can potentially limit the overall frame rate of the system, or can cause motion blur, which can limit its use to certain types of applications. This higher processing complexity can necessitate an external application processor, which may be beyond the application’s requirements.
• For longer distance measurements or environments with high levels of ambient light, higher continuous optical power (compared to that of pulsed ToF) will become necessary; this continuous illumination from the laser could cause thermal and reliability issues.

Advantages of Pulse-Based ToF Technology Systems:

• Pulse-based ToF technology systems often rely on high energy light pulses emitted in very short bursts during a short integration window. This offers the following advantages:
• It makes it easier to design a system that is robust to ambient light, therefore more conducive to outdoor applications.
• The shorter exposure time minimizes the effect of motion blur.
• The duty cycle of the illumination in a pulse-based ToF system is generally much lower than that of a comparable CW system, thereby offering the following benefits:
• It lowers the overall power dissipation of the system in longer range applications.
• It avoids interference from other pulsed ToF systems by placing the pulse bursts in a different location in the frame from that of the other systems. This can be done by coordinating the placement of the pulses in the frame of the various systems or by using an external photodetector to determine the location of the other system’s pulses. Another method is to dynamically randomize the location of the pulse bursts, which will eliminate the need to coordinate the timing between the various systems, but it will not completely eliminate the interference.
• Since the pulse timing and width do not need to be uniform, different timing schemes can be implemented to enable functions such as wider dynamic range and auto-exposure.

Disadvantages of Pulse-Based ToF Technology Systems:

• Since the pulse width of the transmitted light pulse and the shutter need to be the same, the timing control of the system needs to be highly precise, and a picosecond level of precision may be required depending on the application.
• For maximum efficiency, the illumination pulse width needs to be very short, but with very high power. For this reason, very fast rising/falling edges (less than 1 ns) are required from the laser driver.
• Temperature calibration may be more complicated, compared to that of CW systems since a variation in temperature will affect individual pulse widths, affecting not only the offset and gain, but also its linearity.