Depth Camera Point Cloud Sharpening

A depth camera is a type of camera that uses infrared or structure light to create a 3D depth image of an object being captured. Unlike a traditional camera, which can only capture a 2D image, a depth camera is able to determine the distance between objects within the field-of-view (FoV). As a result, depth cameras have become the popular consumer devices and are often used in applications when the accurate measurement of distance and depth information is important. However, measurement noise is not avoidable and it definitely contaminates depth information. Therefore, this short note presents a simple depth point cloud sharpening scheme to enhance the measurement accuracy, which can give significant contribution for 3D scanning and 3D object reconstruction uses.

I. Introduction

Depth cameras have been widely applied in different fields such as robotics perception [1], unmanned aerial vehicles [2], autonomous vehicles [3], and virtual/augmented reality [4]. They are also commonly used in the fields of computer vision and machine learning for tasks such as object recognition, gesture recognition, gaming, 3D scanning and reconstruction.