3D scene capturing using stereoscopic cameras and a time-of-flight camera

Since advanced 3D video systems employ multiview generation techniques using depth data to provide more realistic and comfortable depth impression, many research works are related to depth generation exploiting a time-offlight (TOF) camera. Most of them use time-consuming depth enhancement methods since the TOF camera generates noisy and unstable depth maps. In this paper, a 3D scene capturing method using stereoscopic cameras and one TOF camera is presented. The proposed method generates two viewpoints´ depth videos corresponding to those of color cameras using depth up-converting and 3D warping techniques instead of using complex and time-consuming depth enhancement processes. In addition, the proposed method is implemented with the multi-thread technique to develop a fast system. Experimental results show that the proposed method generates two viewpoints´ depth videos at 15 fps and those are used for generating multi-view images.