What is the difference between 3D tof camera and ordinary camera?

With the gradual development of technologies such as machine vision and automatic driving, 3D tof cameras are used for object recognition, behavior recognition, and scene modeling related applications. It can be said that 3D tof cameras are the eyes of terminals and robots. So what is a 3D tof camera, and what are the differences compared with the previous ordinary camera (2D). 3D tof camera, also known as depth camera, is through which the depth of field distance of the space can be detected, which is also the biggest difference from ordinary cameras. Pictures taken by a common color camera can see all objects within the camera’s view and record them, but the recorded data does not include the distances of these objects from the camera. We can only judge which objects are farther away from us and which ones are closer through semantic analysis of images, but there is no exact data. The 3D tof camera just solves this problem. Through the data obtained by the 3D tof camera, we can accurately know the distance of each point in the image from the camera, so add the (x, y) coordinates of the point in the 2d image, The three-dimensional space coordinates of each point in the image can be obtained. The real scene can be restored through three-dimensional coordinates, and applications such as scene modeling can be realized.