SpiderCam: Low-Power Snapshot Depth from Differential Defocus

About

We introduce SpiderCam, an FPGA-based snapshot depth-from-defocus camera which produces 480x400 sparse depth maps in real-time at 32.5 FPS over a working range of 52 cm while consuming 624 mW of power in total. SpiderCam comprises a custom camera that simultaneously captures two differently focused images of the same scene, processed with a SystemVerilog implementation of depth from differential defocus (DfDD) on a low-power FPGA. To achieve state-of-the-art power consumption, we present algorithmic improvements to DfDD that overcome challenges caused by low-power sensors, and design a memory-local implementation for streaming depth computation on a device that is too small to store even a single image pair. We report the first sub-Watt total power measurement for passive FPGA-based 3D cameras in the literature.

Marcos A. Ferreira, Tianao Li, John Mamish, Josiah Hester, Yaman Sangar, Qi Guo, Emma Alexander · 2026

Related benchmarks

Task	Dataset	Result
Depth Estimation	Real scenes	FPS32.5	11
Depth from Stereo	Real-world Sensor Capture	Core Power Min (W)—	7
Stereo Depth Estimation	Hardware Performance Evaluation	Throughput (Mpix/sec)—	7
Depth-from-Defocus	Real-world Sensor Capture	Core Power Min (W)0.24	3
Depth-from-Defocus	Hardware Performance Evaluation	Throughput (Mpix/sec)59.9	3