Time-of-Flight Camera Calibration for Improved 3D Reconstruction of Indoor Scenes

Calibration for Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras are different from traditional color cameras, in that their calibration involves additional error compensation steps for the depth camera caused by complicated factors. Without this process, there may be obvious misalignment between the projection of 3d points measured by the ToF camera, and their corresponding points on the intensity image provided at the same time, via a perspective mapping. To this regard, we begin by analyzing the various error sources of ToF camera, and then modeling the two main kinds of errors, namely, distance-based and intensity-based error. Accordingly, we then compensate for the two kind of errors and automatically obtain a precise alignment between the 3D and 2D data given by the ToF camera. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of our method, and we anticipate that this error compensation approach can serve to improve the quality of 3D reconstructions obtained from such combinations of imaging devices.