Depth data calibration and enhancement of time-of-flight video-plus-depth camera

In this paper, we present a method to calibrate and enhance depth information captured by an infrared (IR)-based time-of-flight video-plus-depth camera called “Kinect camera”. For depth data calibration, we use color and IR images of a chessboard with on-off halogen light sources to calculate camera parameters of the video and IR sensors in the Kinect camera. For depth data enhancement, we introduce weighted joint bilateral filtering based on distance transform of the color and depth images. Experimental results show that our method calibrates the video and depth sensors successfully and reduces the noise in captured depth images efficiently.