CS-ToF: High-resolution compressive time-of-flight imaging

Three-dimensional imaging using Time-of-flight (ToF) sensors is rapidly gaining widespread adoption in many applications due to their cost e ectiveness, simplicity, and compact size. However, the current generation of ToF cameras su ers from low spatial resolution due to physical fabrication limitations. In this paper, we propose CS-ToF, an imaging architecture to achieve high spatial resolution ToF imaging via optical multiplexing and compressive sensing. Our approach is based on the observation that, while depth is non-linearly related to ToF pixel measurements, a phasor representation of captured images results in a linear image formation model. We utilize this property to develop a CS-based technique that is used to recover high resolution 3D images. Based on the proposed architecture, we developed a prototype 1-megapixel compressive ToF camera that achieves as much as 4 × improvement in spatial resolution and 3 × improvement for natural scenes. We believe that our proposed CS-ToF architecture provides a simple and low-cost solution to improve the spatial resolution of ToF and related sensors.