Performance Evaluation of High-Resolution Time-of-Flight Cameras

A Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera is a 3D imaging device to perceive the range information between the ToF sensor and the scene for each camera’s imaging plane pixel. It has been about 20 years since the first ToF prototype was invented based on Photonic Mixer Device (PMD) technology. With the breakthrough of the ToF sensor in terms of depth pixel array at the Video Graphics Array (VGA 640 × 480 px) level in recent years, more and more high-resolution ToF cameras are pouring into the market. In this Thesis, five state-of-the-art high-resolution ToF cameras, Azure Kinect, Helio2, L515, S100D, and AD-96TOF1-EBZ, are compared via a series of experiments in terms of several key parameters, such as warm-up time, precision, lateral resolution, range resolution, and flying pixel. Some notable results are as follows: At a distance of 1m from the white panel, the distance measurement of S100D is stable with a fluctuation within 1 mm after being powered up. Azure Kinect, Helio2, and L515 can achieve precision within 2 mm in the measuring range of 0.5 to 3 m. For the point cloud of the white panel generated by L515 at a distance of 1.5m, only a small amount of flying pixel noise exists at the edge.