Development and investigation of a long-range time-of-flight and color imaging system

Time-of-flight (Tof) imaging based on the photonic mixer device (PMD) or similar ToF imaging solutions has been limited to short distances in the past, due to limited lighting devices and low sensitivity of ToF imaging chips. Long-range distance measurements are typically the domain of laser scanning systems. In this paper, PMD based medium- and long-range lighting devices working together with a 2-D/3-D camera are presented and several measurement results are discussed. The proposed imaging systems suffer from two systematic limitations in addition to problems due to wind and insufficient lighting: a low lateral resolution of the depth imaging chip and ambiguities in the distance measurements. In order to provide a robust and flexible system, we introduce algorithms to obtain unambiguous depth values (phase unwrapping) and to perform a joint motion compensation and super-resolution. Several experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the components of the multimodal imaging system.