SpiderCam: Low-Power Snapshot Depth from Differential Defocus

Marcos A. Ferreira, Tianao Li, John Mamish, Josiah Hester, Yaman Sangar, Qi Guo, Emma Alexander; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 41699-41709

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 611 mW of power in total. SpiderCam comprises a custom camera which 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.