Efficient and robust reduction of motion artifacts for 3D Time-of-Flight cameras

3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras are capable to acquire dense depth maps of a scene by determining the time it takes for light to travel from a source to an object and back to the camera. Determining the depth requires multiple measurements. Current ToF system are not able to acquire all these measurements simultaneously. If the observed scene is changing during the acquisition of data for computation of a single depth map, the reconstructed values are erroneous. Such errors are known as motion artifacts. This work investigates the causes leading to motion artifacts and proposes a method which significantly reduces this kind of errors. This is done by analyzing the temporal raw data signal of individual pixels, leading to a possibility for identification and correction of affected raw data values. Using a commercial ToF system the method is demonstrated. The proposed algorithms can be implemented in a computationally very efficient way. Thus they can be applied in real-time, even on systems with limited computational resources (e. g. embedded systems).