We present an optical 3-D ranging camera for automotive applications that is able to provide a centimeter depth resolution over a mbox{40}^{\circ} \times mbox{20}^{\circ} field of view up to 45 m with just 1.5 W of active illumination at 808 nm. The enabling technology we developed is based on a CMOS imager chip of 64 \times 32 pixels, each with a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) and three 9-bit digital counters, able to perform lock-in time-of-flight calculation of individual photons emitted by a laser illuminator, reflected by the objects in the scene, and eventually detected by the camera. Due to the SPAD single-photon sensitivity and the smart in-pixel processing, the camera provides state-of-the-art performance at both high frame rates and very low light levels without the need for scanning and with global shutter benefits. Furthermore, the CMOS process is automotive certified.

Automotive Three-Dimensional Vision Through a Single-Photon Counting SPAD Camera

BRONZI, DANILO;ZOU, YU;VILLA, FEDERICA ALBERTA;TISA, SIMONE;TOSI, ALBERTO;ZAPPA, FRANCO
2015-01-01

Abstract

We present an optical 3-D ranging camera for automotive applications that is able to provide a centimeter depth resolution over a mbox{40}^{\circ} \times mbox{20}^{\circ} field of view up to 45 m with just 1.5 W of active illumination at 808 nm. The enabling technology we developed is based on a CMOS imager chip of 64 \times 32 pixels, each with a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) and three 9-bit digital counters, able to perform lock-in time-of-flight calculation of individual photons emitted by a laser illuminator, reflected by the objects in the scene, and eventually detected by the camera. Due to the SPAD single-photon sensitivity and the smart in-pixel processing, the camera provides state-of-the-art performance at both high frame rates and very low light levels without the need for scanning and with global shutter benefits. Furthermore, the CMOS process is automotive certified.
2015
Automotive Engineering; Computer Science Applications1707 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Mechanical Engineering, sezele
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/983933
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