Kinect range sensing: Structured-light versus Time-of-Flight Kinect☆
Section snippets
Introduction and related works
In the last decade, several new range sensing devices have been developed and have been made available for application development at affordable costs. In 2010, Microsoft, in cooperation with PrimeSense released a structured-light (SL) based range sensing camera, the so-called Kinect™, that delivers reliable depth images at VGA resolution at 30 Hz, coupled with an RGB-color camera at the same image resolution. Even though the camera was mainly designed for gaming, it achieved great popularity
Structured light cameras: KinectSL
Even though the principle of structured light (SL) range sensing is comparatively old, the launch of the Microsoft Kinect™ (KinectSL) in 2010 as interaction device for the XBox 360 clearly demonstrates the maturity of the underlying principle.
General considerations for comparing KinectSL and KinectToF
Before presenting the experimental setups and the comparison between the two Kinect devices, we have to consider the limitations which this kind of comparison encounters. For both, the KinectSL and the KinectToF cameras, there are no official, publicly available reference implementations which explain all stages from raw data acquisition to the final range data delivery. Thus, any effect observed may either relate to the sensor hardware, i.e. to the measurement principle as such, or to the
Experimental results and comparison
In Sections 4.2–4.8 we present the different test scenarios we designed in order to capture specific error sources of the KinectSL and the KinectToF-cameras. Before going into the scenarios, in Section 4.1 we will briefly present the camera parameters and the pixel statistics.
Our major design goal for the test scenarios was to capture individual effects as isolatedly as possible. Furthermore, we designed the scenarios in a way that they can be reproduced in order to adopt them to any other
Conclusion
This paper presents an in-depth comparison between the two versions of the Kinect range sensor, i.e. the KinectSL, which is based on the Structured Light principle, and the new Time-of-Flight variant KinectToF. We present a framework for evaluating Structured Light and Time-of-Flight cameras, such as the two Kinect variants, for which we give detailed insight here. Our evaluation framework consists of seven experimental setups that cover the full range of known artifacts for these kinds of
Acknowledgments
This research was partially funded by our collaboration partner Delphi Deutschland GmbH. The authors would like to thank Microsoft Inc. for making the prototype of the KinectToF-cameras available via the Kinect For Windows Developer Preview Program (K4W DPP) and Dr. Rainer Bornemann from the Center for Sensor Systems of Northrhine-Westphalia (ZESS), Siegen, for the reference measurements of the illumination signal for the KinectToF camera and for the support in measuring the ambient
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This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Pushmeet Kohli.