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.