1.4kDots Consumer LiDAR up to 10m Based on Indirect Time-of-Flight Sensor

This paper describes a 940nm indirect Time-of-Flight (iToF) system using a 38x38 dot pattern illumination emitting 2.5W peak over 80° diagonal field-of-view. The illumination system takes advantages of meta-surface optical elements (MOE) designed to generate a point cloud of 1444 vertices best case. The RX subsystem is based on a 0.54Mpix iToF sensor with 4.6µm pixel configured in 2x2 analogue binning mode. The use of patterned light is confirmed to extend the depth range up to 10m. Compared to flood illumination, dot pattern illumination provides a depth extension factor by 2.05 at 0kLux and by 5 at 100kLux. The system consumes < 300mW at 30fps with <0.92% depth noise under 100kLux. Due to the patterned light, the proposed consumer LiDAR is demonstrated to be robust against ambient light suitable for AR/VR applications.