High-quality scanning using time-of-flight depth superresolution

Time-of-flight (TOF) cameras robustly provide depth data of real world scenes at video frame rates. Unfortunately, currently available camera models provide rather low X-Y resolution. Also, their depth measurements are starkly influenced by random and systematic errors which renders them inappropriate for high-quality 3D scanning. In this paper we show that ideas from traditional color image superresolution can be applied to TOF cameras in order to obtain 3D data of higher X-Y resolution and less noise. We will also show that our approach, which works using depth images only, bears many advantages over alternative depth upsampling methods that combine information from separate high-resolution color and low-resolution depth data.