dtof op• Data kinds: counts → measurement
• Call: import fullseye as fs; fs.ledger.dtof_depth(hist, bin_ps=100.0, mode='peak', offset_ps=0.0, subtract_background=False) (to call the implementation directly, import photoncount; photoncount.dtof_depth(hist, bin_ps=100.0, mode='peak', offset_ps=0.0, subtract_background=False); from the registry, opsphoton.get("dtof_depth"))
Distance from a photon arrival-time histogram: d = c*t/2.
Direct time-of-flight. The light travels to the target and back, so the one-way distance is half the round-trip time times the speed of light. *bin_ps* is the width of one time bin (a 100 ps bin is 1.50 cm of depth).
Four estimators, from crudest to sharpest:
• "peak" — the centre of the fullest bin. Quantised to the bin grid; the error is uniform in +-half a bin (+-0.75 cm at 100 ps).
• "centroid" — the first moment of the whole histogram. Exact for a symmetric pulse *with no background*, and badly biased toward the middle of the window with one — pass subtract_background=True.
• "parabolic" — a parabola through the peak bin and its two neighbours. Sub-bin, cheap, and biased for a Gaussian pulse.
• "gaussian" — the same parabola fitted to the log of those three samples, which is the exact vertex for a Gaussian pulse.
Measured on a noiseless simulated return at 2.4371 m (256 bins x 100 ps, 500 ps IRF), absolute error: peak 1.29 mm, centroid 4.4e-16 m, parabolic 0.067 mm, gaussian 9.4e-9 m — three orders of magnitude between the crudest and the sharpest.
With Poisson noise (200 signal + 200 ambient photons, seed 0) the same four give 13.7 mm, 146.5 mm (with subtract_background=True), 8.5 mm and 8.0 mm. Two honest readings of that: once shot noise dominates the sub-bin estimators buy about 1.6x, not three orders of magnitude, and the centroid collapses because a median-subtracted ambient floor still leaves noise across the whole window that drags the first moment toward the centre. Use "gaussian" or "parabolic" on noisy data; use "centroid" only when the background is genuinely gone.
*offset_ps* is a system delay to remove: t_flight = t_measured - offset_ps, so a positive offset makes the answer *closer*. Returns the distance in metres as a float.
Raises ValueError: negative, non-finite, non-1-D or all-zero *hist*, a non-positive *bin_ps*, an unknown *mode*, a non-finite *offset_ps*, a flat histogram in a peak-based mode (argmax would silently pick bin 0 and report the first bin's depth), a peak in the first or last bin with a sub-bin *mode* (there is no neighbour to fit to — use "peak"), a degenerate three-sample fit, and — instead of returning a negative distance — an *offset_ps* larger than the measured arrival time.
• photon_timeresolved family guide
• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).
• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.
• The canonical algorithm (author, year) and its uses are named in the family usage guide above.
• photon_timeresolved — py -3.11 examples/photon_timeresolved.py
• poc_dtof_ranging — py -3.11 examples/poc_dtof_ranging.py
measurement as input)—
dtof)dtof_cube_simulate · dtof_cube_depth
*Provenance: photoncount.py — PHOTON operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*
© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.