![](bg7.png)
Microsoft Kinect, which uses a novel depth imaging
technique, is compared to state of the art continuous
wave amplitude modulation Time-of-Flight cameras.
A set of experimental setups was devised to evaluate
the respective strengths and weaknesses of the
cameras as well as of the underlying technology.
It was found that the new technique as well as
the concrete implementation poses a strong
competition in at least the near field indoor area of
application. Only the problems caused by the
triangulation, namely shading due to different
viewpoints, measuring difficulties of sharp angles
and measuring of small structures, are major
weaknesses of the Kinect.
Acquiring full frame depth measurements at high
frame rates in an outdoor environment or for longer
distances seem to be domain of ToF based depth
measuring up until today. For indoor scenes higher
resolutions like the currently developed 100k PMD
chip by PMDTec may level the playing field again.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was funded by the German Research
Foundation (DFG) as part of the research training
group GRK 1564 ’Imaging New Modalities’.
REFERENCES
Beder, C., Bartczak, B., and Koch, R., 2007. A
Comparison of PMD-Cameras and Stereo-Vision for
the Task of Surface Reconstruction using Patchlets. In
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer
Vision and Pattern Recognition, Minneapolis, USA.
Böhler, W., Bordas Vicent, M., and Marbs, A., 2003.
Investigating Laser Scanner Accuracy. In The
International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote
Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol.
XXXIV, Part 5/C15, pp. 696-701.
Chiabrando, F., Chiabrando, R., Piatti, D., and Rinaudo,
F., 2009. Sensors for 3D Imaging: Metric Evaluation
and Calibration of a CCD/CMOS Time-of-Flight
Camera. In Sensors 2009, vol. 9, no. 12, pp. 10080-
10096.
Kahlmann, T., Remondino, F., and Ingensand, H., 2006.
Calibration for increased accuracy of the range
imaging camera swissranger. In International Archives
of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial
Information Sciences, ISPRS Commission V
Symposium, volume XXXVI, pp. 136–141.
Lindner, M., and Kolb, A., 2006. Lateral and Depth
Calibration of PMD-Distance Sensors. In Advances in
Visual Computing, Vol. 2, Springer, pp. 524-533.
Lottner, O., Weihs, W., and Hartmann, K., 2008. Time-of-
flight cameras with multiple distributed illumination
units. In Proceedings of the 8th conference on Signal
processing, computational geometry and artificial
vision, Rhodes, Greece, pp. 40-45.
Möller, T., Kraft, H., Frey, J., Albrecht, M., and Lange,
R., 2005. Robust 3D Measurement with PMD Sensors.
In Proceedings of the 1st Range Imaging Research
Day at ETH Zürich.
OpenKinect Wiki. http://openkinect.org.
PMDTechnologies GmbH. http://www.pmdtec.com.
Radmer, J., Fuste, P. M., Schmidt, H., and Kruger, J.,
2008. Incident light related distance error study and
calibration of the PMD-range imaging camera. In
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference Computer Vision
and Pattern Recognition Workshops, Anchorage,
USA.
Rapp, H., Frank, M., Hamprecht, F. A., and Jahne, B.,
2008. A theoretical and experimental investigation of
the systematic errors and statistical uncertainties of
Time-Of-Flight-cameras. In International Journal of
Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications,
Vol. 5, No.3/4, pp. 402-413.
Reynolds, M., Doboš, J., Peel, L., Weyrich, T., and
Brostow, G. J., 2011. Capturing Time-of-Flight Data
with Confidence. In Proceedings of the IEEE
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference,
Colorado Springs, USA.
Schiller, I., Beder, C., and Koch, R. 2008., Calibration of a
PMD-Camera using a Planar Calibration Pattern
together with a Multi-Camera Setup. In The
International Archives of the Photogrammetry,
Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences,
Vol. XXXVII, Part B3a, Beijing, China, pp. 297-302.
Stoyanov, T., Louloudi, A., Andreasson, H., and
Lilienthal, A. J., 2011. Comparative Evaluation of
Range Sensor Accuracy in Indoor Environments. In
Proceedings of the European Conference on Mobile
Robots (ECMR).
Wiedemann, M., Sauer, M., Driewer, F., and Schilling, K.,
2008. Analysis and characterization of the PMD
camera for application in mobile robotics. In
Proceedings of the 17th World Congress of The
International Federation of Automatic Control, Seoul,
Korea, pp. 13689 - 13694.
ICPRAM 2012 - International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods
444