3-D cameras for cellphones

Clever math could enable a high-quality 3-D camera so simple, cheap and power-efficient that it could be incorporated into handheld devices.

At MIT, researchers have used the Kinect to create a “Minority Report”-style computer interface, a navigation system for miniature robotic helicopters and a holographic-video transmitter, among other things.

Now imagine a device that provides more-accurate depth information than the Kinect, has a greater range and works under all lighting conditions — but is so small, cheap and power-efficient that it could be incorporated into a cellphone at very little extra cost.

Depth-sensing cameras can produce ‘depth maps’ like this one, in which distances are depicted as shades on a gray-scale spectrum (lighter objects are closer, darker ones farther away). Image: flickr/Dominic

Clocking in

Like other sophisticated depth-sensing devices, the MIT researchers’ system uses the “time of flight” of light particles to gauge depth: A pulse of infrared laser light is fired at a scene, and the camera measures the time it takes the light to return from objects at different distances.

Traditional time-of-flight systems use one of two approaches to build up a “depth map” of a scene. LIDAR (for light detection and ranging) uses a scanning laser beam that fires a series of pulses, each corresponding to a point in a grid, and separately measures their time of return. But that makes data acquisition slower, and it requires a mechanical system to continually redirect the laser. The alternative, employed by so-called time-of-flight cameras, is to illuminate the whole scene with laser pulses and use a bank of sensors to register the returned light. But sensors able to distinguish small groups of light particles — photons — are expensive: A typical time-of-flight camera costs thousands of dollars.

The MIT researchers’ system, by contrast, uses only a single light detector — a one-pixel camera. But by using some clever mathematical tricks, it can get away with firing the laser a limited number of times.

CODAC: Compressive Depth Acquisition Camera

On the cheap

Indeed, the algorithm lets the researchers get away with relatively crude hardware. Their system measures the time of flight of photons using a cheap photodetector and an ordinary analog-to-digital converter — an off-the-shelf component already found in all cellphones. The sensor takes about 0.7 nanoseconds to register a change to its input.

That’s enough time for light to travel 21 centimeters, Goyal says. “So for an interval of depth of 10 and a half centimeters — I’m dividing by two because light has to go back and forth — all the information is getting blurred together,” he says. Because of the parametric algorithm, however, the researchers’ system can distinguish objects that are only two millimeters apart in depth. “It doesn’t look like you could possibly get so much information out of this signal when it’s blurred together,” Goyal says.

The researchers’ algorithm is also simple enough to run on the type of processor ordinarily found in a smartphone. To interpret the data provided by the Kinect, by contrast, the Xbox requires the extra processing power of a graphics-processing unit, or GPU, a powerful special-purpose piece of hardware.

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