Abstract
We present a Montecarlo simulator developed in Matlab® for the analysis of a Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD)-based Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) flash Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) system. The simulation environment has been developed to accurately model the components of a flash LIDAR system, such as illumination source, optics, and the architecture of the designated SPAD-based CMOS image sensor. Together with the modeling of the background noise and target topology, all of the fundamental factors that are involved in a typical LIDAR acquisition system have been included in order to predict the achievable system performance and verified with an existing sensor.
Highlights
Three-dimensional (3D) imaging enables spatial perception for a broad set of application fields, such as personal smart devices, the entertainment industry, industrial production environments, and autonomous vehicles and spacecrafts
Several techniques exist to extract the depth of the objects in the scene [1] and, in this paper, we focus on direct Time-of-Flight (D-ToF) systems
The core of such a 3D imaging system is represented by a Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD)-based Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor, where each pixel is able to extract a distance measurement from the elapsed time between the emission of a laser pulse and the detection of the reflected light
Summary
Three-dimensional (3D) imaging enables spatial perception for a broad set of application fields, such as personal smart devices, the entertainment industry, industrial production environments, and autonomous vehicles and spacecrafts. Time-of-flight (ToF) systems extract the distance estimating the time the light takes to travel from a proper pulsed or modulated emitter to the target and back to a time-resolved photon detector. In I-ToF systems, the depth information is estimated by measuring the phase-shift of the received pulsed or modulated light with respect to the emitted one. This is typically achieved by means of photo-demodulators implemented at the pixel level and, in practice, it requires the acquisition of three or more sub-frames, acquired in series and properly combining modulation/demodulation schemes to remove the background, measure the target reflectivity, and estimate its depth.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call