Performance Evaluation of State-of-the-Art High-Resolution Time-of-Flight Cameras

It has been about 20 years since the disruptive appearance of the first time-of-flight (ToF) cameras. Since then, ToF imaging has progressively evolved. Nowadays, ToF sensors have broken the barrier of the 1-megapixel resolution, and a significant number of high-resolution ToF cameras have appeared in the market. To provide a better understanding of their performance and applications, we experimentally evaluate three state-of-the-art high-resolution ToF cameras such as Azure Kinect, Helios2, and S100D, together with the solid-state LiDAR L515. We perform various experiments to examine some key parameters, such as warm-up times, accuracy, precision, lateral and axial resolutions, edge noise, unsteady scenes, and modulated waveform and optical power. Our evaluation draws various conclusions: S100D shows fluctuations within 1 mm after being powered up while the others require warm-up times. Azure Kinect, Helios2, and L515 can achieve precision within 2 mm in a measuring range of 0.5–3 m. Helios2 and S100D are more severely affected by dynamic scenes. Finally, the point clouds (PCs) generated for a white panel at a distance of 1.5 m show that flying pixels are present in all cameras, being this problem less acute for the L515.