Correction of the temperature dependent error in a correlation based time-of-flight system by measuring the distortion of the correlation signal

Abstract

Correlation based time-of-flight systems suffer from a temperature dependent distance measurement error induced by the illumination source of the system. A change of the temperature of the illumination source, results in the change of the bandwidth of the used light emitters, which are light emitting diodes (LEDs) most of the time. For typical illumination sources this can result in a drift of the measured distance in the range of ~20 cm, especially during the heat up phase. Due to the change of the bandwidth of the LEDs the shape of the output signal changes as well. In this paper we propose a method to correct this temperature dependent error by investigating this change of the shape of the output signal. Our measurements show, that the presented approach is capable of correcting the temperature dependent error in a large range of operation without the need for additional hardware.