Lateral and Depth Calibration of PMD-Distance Sensors

A growing number of modern applications such as position determination, object recognition and collision prevention depend on accurate scene analysis. The estimation of an object’s distance relative to an observers position by image analysis or laser scan techniques is thereby still the most time-consuming and expansive part. A lower-priced and much faster alternative is the distance measurement with modulated, coherent infrared light based on the Photo Mixing Detector (PMD) technique. As this approach is a rather new and unexplored method, proper calibration techniques have not been widely investigated yet. This paper describes an accurate distance calibration approach for PMD-based distance sensoring.