High Quality Range Data Acquisition Using Time-of-Flight Camera and Stereo Vision

Time-of-flight range camera (referred to as TOF camera) has many advantages: compact, easy to use and can obtain three-dimensional depth data of any scene in real-time, which makes it increasingly widely used in various applications. However, TOF camera produces very noisy depth map and often performs poorly on the rich-textured scenes, such as textiles, in which situations stereo vision excels. To solve this problem and use the merits of two methods respectively, we propose a method for jointly using TOF cameras and stereo vision to produce a high quality depth map for surfaces that have rich texture. We choose textiles as experimental object, and the result shows that our method significantly improves the quality of the textile´s depth data captured from TOF camera. So we also expand the scope of application of TOF cameras.