What is the difference between tof camera and ordinary camera?

With the gradual development of machine vision, automatic driving and other technologies, there are more and more applications related to object recognition, behavior recognition, and scene modeling using tof cameras. It can be said that depth cameras are the eyes of terminals and robots. So what is a tof camera? , Compared with the previous ordinary camera (2D), what are the differences? The depth camera is also called a 3D tof camera. As the name implies, the depth of field distance of the shooting space can be detected by the camera, which is also the biggest difference from ordinary cameras.
Pictures taken by a common color camera can see all objects within the camera’s view and record them, but the recorded data does not include the distances of these objects from the camera. Only through the semantic analysis of images can we judge which objects are farther away from us and which ones are closer, but there is no exact data. The tof depth camera just solves this problem. Through the data obtained by the tof camera, we can accurately know the distance of each point in the image from the camera, so adding the (x, y) coordinates of the point in the 2D image, we can Get the 3D space coordinates of each point in the image. Real scenes can be restored through 3D coordinates, and applications such as scene modeling can be realized.