Time-of-flight motion misalignment artifact correction

A method of mitigating motion misalignment of a time-of-flight sensor system, comprising:

• receiving a stream of frames outputted by a sensor of the time-of-flight sensor system, the stream of frames comprises a series of frame sequences, wherein a frame sequence comprises a set of frames where the frames in the set have different frame types, and wherein a frame type of a frame signifies sensor parameters of the time-of-flight sensor system when the frame is captured by the time-of-flight sensor system such that the different frame types signify different sensor parameters;
• identifying a pair of non-adjacent successive passive frames for which the time-of-flight sensor system is inhibited from emitting light in the stream of frames;
• calculating computed optical flow data based on the pair of non-adjacent frames in the stream of frames;
• generating estimated optical flow data for at least one differing frame other than the pair of non-adjacent frames in the stream of frames based on the computed optical flow data;
• and
• realigning the at least one differing frame based on the estimated optical flow data.

A time-of-flight sensor system, comprising:

• a receiver system comprising a sensor;
• and
• a computing system in communication with the receiver system, comprising:
• a processor;
• and
• memory that stores computer-executable instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform acts comprising:
• receiving a stream of frames outputted by the sensor of the receiver system of the time-of-flight sensor system, the stream of frames comprises a series of frame sequences, wherein a frame sequence comprises a set of frames where the frames in the set have different frame types, and wherein a frame type of a frame signifies sensor parameters of the time-of-flight sensor system when the frame is captured by the time-of-flight sensor system such that the different frame types signify different sensor parameters;
• identifying a pair of non-adjacent successive passive frames for which the time-of-flight sensor system is inhibited from emitting light in the stream of frames;
• calculating computed optical flow data based on the pair of non-adjacent frames in the stream of frames;
• generating estimated optical flow data for at least one differing frame other than the pair of non-adjacent frames in the stream of frames based on the computed optical flow data;
• realigning the at least one differing frame based on the estimated optical flow data;
• computing object depth data based on realigned frames in the frame sequence;
• and
• outputting a point cloud comprising the object depth data.