Scan rectification for structured light range sensors with rolling shutters

Structured light range sensors, such as the Microsoft Kinect, have recently become popular as perception devices for computer vision and robotic systems. These sensors use CMOS imaging chips with electronic rolling shutters (ERS). When using such a sensor on a moving platform, both the image, and the depth map, will exhibit geometric distortions. We introduce an algorithm that can suppress such distortions, by rectifying the 3D point clouds from the range sensor. This is done by first estimating the time continuous 3D camera trajectory, and then transforming the 3D points to where they would have been, if the camera had been stationary. To ensure that image and range data are synchronous, the camera trajectory is computed from KLT tracks on the structured-light frames, after suppressing the structured-light pattern. We evaluate our rectification, by measuring angles between the visible sides of a cube, before and after rectification. We also measure how much better the 3D point clouds can be aligned after rectification. The obtained improvement is also related to the actual rotational velocity, measured using a MEMS gyroscope.