Calibration and Registration for Precise Surface Reconstruction with TOF Cameras

Abstract

This paper presents a method for precise surface reconstruction with time-of-flight (TOF) cameras. A novel calibration approach which simplifies the calibration task and doubles the camera’s precision is developed and compared to current calibration methods. Remaining errors are tackled by applying filter and error distributing methods. Thus, a reference object is circumferentially reconstructed with an overall mean precision of approximately 3mm in translation and 3° in rotation. The resulting model serves as quantification of achievable reconstruction precision with TOF cameras. This is a major criteria for the potential analysis of this sensor technology, that is firstly demonstrated within this work.