Surveillance and Activity Recognition with Depth Information

In the present treatise an image sensor acquiring additional depth information is applied to extend regular computer vision algorithms. The so called photonic mixer device (PMD) basing on the time-of-flight principle can measure the distance between a smart pixel on the image sensor and the object being recorded. Since the resolution of such a sensor is rather low, they are not intended to replace existing image acquisition technologies, i.e. CMOS or CCD cameras, but can rather be employed to assist and speed up several tasks, especially image segmentation or object detection tasks.