Ray Tracing Algorithm for Scene Generation in Simulation of Photonic Mixer Device Sensors

In industrial and automotive environment, speedy and reliable procurement of 3D data has become essential and is one of the main requirements for future development. Photonic mixer device (PMD) sensors which are based on time of flight (TOF) technology aim at delivering speedy images with depth data to suit the real-time applications. A software simulation of such sensor is an integral for its design and calibration. Expensive prototypes can be avoided for sensor testing and calibration as the sensor characteristics can be fixed by using a software simulator. Ray tracing is crucial for scene generation, which is a key step in sensor simulation. This paper proposes sequential algorithm for ray tracing for scene generation in the simulation process of PMD sensors. The algorithm is implemented for scene generation using basic shapes like plane, box, sphere and triangle with all possible combinations. It is observed that some shapes like triangle take more time to compute its 3D information as compared to other shapes like box, plane and sphere due to complexity. It is also possible to get 3D information for all possible combinations of basic shapes in the scene generation. The time taken by the system to generate a scene with multiple objects is not affected by the order in which the objects are placed in the scene. Scene generation takes more time, if the triangle is involved in scene generation.