Frequency Domain TOF: Encoding Object Depth in Modulation Frequency

Time of flight cameras may emerge as the 3-D sensor of choice. Today, time of flight sensors use phase-based sampling, where the phase delay between emitted and received, high-frequency signals encodes distance. In this paper, we present a new time of flight architecture that relies only on frequency—we refer to this technique as frequency-domain time of flight (FD-TOF). Inspired by optical coherence tomography (OCT), FD-TOF excels when frequency bandwidth is high. With the increasing frequency of TOF sensors, new challenges to time of flight sensing continue to emerge. At high frequencies, FD-TOF offers several potential benefits over phase-based time of flight methods.