Michael Lehmann, currently a research associate at IMES and formerly involved in the development of ToF cameras himself, gave a brief introduction to the topic and highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods, “direct ToF” and “indirect ToF.”
In the keynote presentation “From Raw Signal to 3D Point Cloud,” Silvan Forrer, Senior FPGA Design Engineer at Leica Geosystems AG, introduced the Leica BLK2GO Pulse scanner. This compact scanner allows rooms in a building to be quickly digitized—simply by walking through them with the device. Silvan Forrer outlined the complex system consisting of two ToF cameras and four color cameras. An FPGA handles the preprocessing of the ToF data. Silvan Forrer shared some behind-the-scenes insights and highlighted some of the hurdles he and his team had to overcome, as well as the tricks they employed during FPGA development. The microcontroller then combines the distance and color images to create a map of the interior spaces. After the presentation, attendees passed the scanner around with great interest.