Common vision sensors on the market include monocular cameras, binocular cameras, structured light cameras, panoramic cameras, infrared cameras, ToF cameras, etc. When it comes to depth cameras, ToF, structured light and binocular technologies are usually compared.
Compared with structured light, ToF camera technology is less difficult to implement, and the transmitted signal can be returned when it encounters the target, unlike structured light, which requires laser speckle coding first, and then extracts coding features. Moreover, the tof camera is less affected by the environment, and it has better anti-interference ability. And the tof camera has a wider range of applications. It can be used for intelligent robot vacuum navigation, map construction, and obstacle avoidance for drones. At present, tof cameras can also be seen in the medical industry and the logistics industry.
Compared with binocular imaging technology, ToF camera technology is not affected by shadows to a large extent because it actively emits light sources, and the output depth data is calculated by de-phasing, and it still has good results in dim scenes. Moreover, the depth map generated by the tof camera is not supported by complex feature registration, triangulation and other algorithms, so it does not depend on the quality of feature matching, and it is not affected by the surface texture of the object and the angle of ambient light illumination. It is naturally superior to the binocular imaging process that undergoes a lot of complex calculations in the real-time performance of depth map generation.
