Heesun Yoon

Three-dimensional imaging using fast micromachined electro-absorptive shutter

Abstract. A 20-MHz switching high-speed light-modulating device for three-dimensional (3-D) image capturing and its system prototype are presented. For 3-D image capturing, the system utilizes a time-of-flight (TOF) principle by means of a 20-MHz high-speed micromachined electro-absorptive modulator, the so-called optical shutter. The high-speed modulation is obtained by utilizing the electro-absorption mechanism of the multilayer structure, which has an optical resonance cavity and light-absorption epilayers grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition process. The optical shutter device is specially designed to have small resistor–capacitor–time constant to get the high-speed modulation. The optical shutter is positioned in front of a standard high-resolution complementary metal oxide semiconductor image sensor. The optical shutter modulates the incoming infrared image to acquire the depth image. The suggested novel optical shutter device enables capturing of a full high resolution-depth image, which has been limited to video graphics array (VGA) by previous depth-capturing technologies. The suggested 3-D image sensing device can have a crucial impact on 3-D–related business such as 3-D cameras, gesture recognition, user interfaces, and 3-D displays. This paper presents micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems-based optical shutter design, fabrication, characterization, 3-D camera system prototype, and image evaluation.

A robust design and fabrication of micromachined electro-absorptive optical modulator for 3D imaging

A time-of-flight (TOF) based three dimensional (3D) image capturing system and its enhanced optical modulating device are presented. The 3D image capturing system includes 850nm IR emitter (typically compact Laser diodes) and high speed image modulator, so called optical shutter. The optical shutter consists of multi-layered optical resonance cavity and electro-absorptive layers. The optical shutter is a solid-state controllable filter which modulates the IR image to extract the phase delay due to TOF of the emitting IR light. This presentation especially addresses robustness issues and solutions when operated under practical environments such as ambient temperature variation and existence of strong ambient light (e.g. outdoors). The wavelength of laser diode varies substantially depending on the ambient temperature, which degrades the modulation efficiency. To get a robust operation, the bandwidth of transmittance of the optical shutter is drastically improved with a novel coupled Fabry-Perot resonance cavity design to come up with the wavelength variation of the laser diode. Also, to suppress the interference of solar irradiance to IR source signal, a novel driving scheme is applied, in which IR light and optical shutter modulation duties are timely localized, i. e. ‘bursted’. Suggested novel optical shutter design and burst driving scheme enable capturing of a full HD resolution of depth image under the realistic usage environments, which so far tackle the commercialization of TOF cameras. Design, fabrication, and evaluation of the optical shutter; and, 3D capturing system prototype, image test results are presented.

MOEMS-based time-of-flight camera for 3D video capturing

We suggest a Time-of-Flight (TOF) video camera capturing real-time depth images (a.k.a depth map), which are generated from the fast-modulated IR images utilizing a novel MOEMS modulator having switching speed of 20 MHz. In general, 3 or 4 independent IR (e.g. 850nm) images are required to generate a single frame of depth image. Captured video image of a moving object frequently shows motion drag between sequentially captured IR images, which results in so called ‘motion blur’ problem even when the frame rate of depth image is fast (e.g. 30 to 60 Hz). We propose a novel ‘single shot’ TOF 3D camera architecture generating a single depth image out of synchronized captured IR images. The imaging system constitutes of 2x2 imaging lens array, MOEMS optical shutters (modulator) placed on each lens aperture and a standard CMOS image sensor. The IR light reflected from object is modulated by optical shutters on the apertures of 2x2 lens array and then transmitted images are captured on the image sensor resulting in 2x2 sub-IR images. As a result, the depth image is generated with those simultaneously captured 4 independent sub-IR images, hence the motion blur problem is canceled. The resulting performance is very useful in the applications of 3D camera to a human-machine interaction device such as user interface of TV, monitor, or hand held devices and motion capturing of human body. In addition, we show that the presented 3D camera can be modified to capture color together with depth image simultaneously on ‘single shot’ frame rate.