3D Camera with Solid-State Shutter for Full HD Depth Image Capturing
Journal
삼성학회
Date
2011.11.07
Abstract
20 Mega-Hertz-switching high speed image shutter device for 3D image capturing and its application
to system prototype are presented. For 3D image capturing, the system utilizes Time-of-Flight
(TOF) principle by means of 20MHz high speed solid-state image modulator, so called optical
shutter. The high speed image modulation is obtained using the electro-optical operation of the
solid-state multi-layer structure having diffractive mirrors and optical resonance cavity which
maximizes the magnitude of optical modulation. The optical shutter device is specially designed
and fabricated realizing low resistance-capacitance cell structures having small RC-time constant.
The optical shutter is positioned in front of a standard high resolution CMOS image sensor and
modulates the IR image reflected from the object to capture a depth image. Suggested novel optical
shutter device enables capturing of a full HD depth image with depth accuracy of mm-scale, which
is the largest depth image resolution among the-state-of-the-art, which has been limited up to
VGA. The 3D Camera prototype realizes 1 Lens-2 Sensor optical architecture to capture 14Mp color
and full HD depth images, simultaneously. The resulting high definition color/depth image and its
capturing device have crucial impact on 3D business eco-system especially on the 3D sensing means
in the fields of 3D camera, gesture recognition, and motion UI, and 3D display. This paper
presents MEMS-based optical shutter design, fabrication, characterization, and 3D camera system
prototype and image test results.