# Reliable iToF Depth Sensing via Sensor-Intrinsic Uncertainty Modeling and State-Space Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05507 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05507/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Is Mamba Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11144/) (2024)
- [GhostNetV2: Enhance Cheap Operation with Long-Range Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12905/) (2022)
- [Tackling 3D ToF Artifacts Through Learning and the FLAT Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10376/) (2018)
- [Deep End-to-End Alignment and Refinement for Time-of-Flight RGB-D Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07623/) (2019)
- [All the attention you need: Global-local, spatial-channel attention for image retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08000/) (2021)
- [iToF2dToF: A Robust and Flexible Representation for Data-Driven Time-of-Flight Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07087/) (2021)
- [RGB Guided ToF Imaging System: A Survey of Deep Learning-based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10357/) (2024)
- [RADU: Ray-Aligned Depth Update Convolutions for ToF Data Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15513/) (2021)
- [Consistent Time-of-Flight Depth Denoising via Graph-Informed Geometric Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23542/) (2025)
- [A Calibration Method for Indirect Time-of-Flight Cameras to Eliminate Internal Scattering Interference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01874/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Indirect time-of-flight (iToF) cameras provide compact and cost-effective dense depth measurements, but their ranging accuracy is often degraded by sensor-intrinsic uncertainty under practical imaging conditions. Spatially uniform or range-only Gaussian perturbations cannot accurately reproduce the range-dependent and signal-dependent noise characteristics of real iToF measurements, leading to a synthetic-to-real gap for learning-based restoration. To address this problem, we propose a joint depth-uncertainty modeling and restoration framework for reliable iToF sensing. A sensor-intrinsic depth-uncertainty model is first developed from calibrated tap responses, returned-signal levels, and sensor noise statistics through a depth-oriented weighted least-squares formulation. The resulting pixel-wise uncertainty is used for heteroscedastic depth synthesis and uncertainty-aware restoration supervision. Based on this heteroscedastic data synthesis, we further develop a U-shaped restoration network with Depth Visual State Space (DVSS) blocks, which combine long-range state-space modeling with convolutional spatial-channel refinement for structure-preserving depth recovery. Experiments on synthetic data and measurements captured by an in-house iToF prototype validate the proposed uncertainty model under varying range and returned-signal conditions. Controlled comparisons with fixed and range-aware Gaussian noise, together with evaluations on U-Net, Restormer, and DVSS, further demonstrate that the proposed synthesis consistently benefits different restoration backbones. The complete framework achieves 40.85~dB PSNR and 2.54 mm MAE on the synthetic test set, and 35.42 dB PSNR and 4.87 mm MAE on real iToF measurements.
