Probabilistic Phase Unwrapping for Single-Frequency Time-of-Flight Range Cameras

This paper proposes a solution to the 2-D phase unwrapping problem, inherent to time-of-flight range sensing technology due to the cyclic nature of phase. Our method uses a single frequency capture period to improve frame rate and decrease the presence of motion artifacts encountered in multiple frequency solutions. We present a probabilistic framework that considers intensity image in addition to the phase image. The phase unwrapping problem is cast in terms of global optimization of a carefully chosen objective function. Comparative experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.