Abstract This paper proposes novel density modulated binary patterns for depth acquisition. Similar to Kinect, the illumination patterns do not need a projector for generation and can be emitted by infrared lasers and diffraction gratings. Our key idea is to use the density of light spots in the patterns to carry phase information. Two technical problems are addressed here. First, we propose an algorithm to design the patterns to carry more phase information without compromising the depth reconstruction from a single captured image as with Kinect. Second, since the carried phase is not strictly sinusoidal, the depth reconstructed from the phase contains a systematic error. We further propose a pixelbased phase matching algorithm to reduce the error. Experimental results show that the depth quality can be greatly improved using the phase carried by the density of light spots. Furthermore, our scheme can achieve 20 fps depth reconstruction with GPU assistance.