Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation Methods of Automotive Time of Flight Based Sensors

Time of Flight (ToF) based three-dimensional (3D) imaging sensors, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors or ToF cameras, can be used to depict their surroundings in form of a point cloud. The ToF method measures the time an emitted light signal takes to be reflected by a point in space and derives the distance from the known travel time of light. More and more ToF based 3D sensors are developed for automotive use as their target application. Automotive sensors are part of a safety critical application. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the provided sensor data is accurate with a known probability. In this paper, we describe and evaluate test procedures for quantitative and qualitative performance evaluation of ToF/LiDAR sensors with focus on automotive use. We propose a LiDAR error and influence model from which we derived eight test areas. We described and conducted tests for six of the eight test areas. The described test cases were evaluated on three LiDAR sensors and one ToF camera. The results show that targets and test procedures need to be adapted to the specific tested ToF/LiDAR sensor. Especially noticeable where influences on test procedures due sparse sensor resolution. Furthermore, the test results show that target application specific tests can provide additional information on the behaviour of the sensor.