Depth Camera Based on Color-Coded Aperture

In this paper we present a single-lens single-frame passive depth sensor based on conventional imaging system with minor hardware modifications. It is based on colorcoded aperture approach and has high light-efficiency which allows capturing images even with handheld devices with small cameras. The sensor measures depth in millimeters in the whole frame, in contrast to prior-art approaches. Contributions of this paper are: (1) introduction of novel light-efficient coded aperture designs and corresponding algorithm modification, (2) depth sensor calibration procedure and disparity to depth conversion method, (3) a number of color-coded aperture based depth sensor implementations including a DSLR based prototype, a smartphone based prototype and a compact camera based prototype, (4) applications including real-time 3D scene reconstruction and depth based image effects.