Uncertainty analysis for optical time-of-flight sensors based on four-phase-shift range calculation

Time-of-flight (Tof) range imaging is a new suitable choice for measurement and modeling in many different applications such as robotics, machine vision, medical imaging, multimedia and so forth. But due to the technology's relatively new appearance on the market the knowledge of its capabilities is very low. This paper presents an uncertainty analysis for optical Tof sensors based on a four-phase-shift algorithm for range value calculation. The measurement uncertainty indicates the interval of the values that the quantity to be measured (in this paper range information) may assume, after all systematic biases have been corrected. The uncertainty analysis is evaluated by simulation. At the end of the paper the results are discussed.