Image processing for three-dimensional scans generated by time-of-flight range cameras

Holger Schöner; Volkmar Wieser; Bernhard Moser; Frank Bauer; Bettina Heise; Adrian A. Dorrington; Andrew D. Payne; Michael J. Cree

doi:10.1117/1.JEI.21.2.023012

21 May 2012 Image processing for three-dimensional scans generated by time-of-flight range cameras

Holger Schöner, Volkmar Wieser, Bernhard Moser, Frank Bauer, Bettina Heise, Adrian A. Dorrington, Andrew D. Payne, Michael J. Cree

Author Affiliations +

Journal of Electronic Imaging, Vol. 21, Issue 2, 023012 (May 2012). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.21.2.023012

Abstract

Time-of-flight (TOF) full-field range cameras use a correlative imaging technique to generate three-dimensional measurements of the environment. Though reliable and cheap they have the disadvantage of high measurement noise and errors that limit the practical use of these cameras in industrial applications. We show how some of these limitations can be overcome with standard image processing techniques specially adapted to TOF camera data. Additional information in the multimodal images recorded in this setting, and not available in standard image processing settings, can be used to improve reduction of measurement noise. Three extensions of standard techniques, wavelet thresholding, adaptive smoothing on a clustering based image segmentation, and an extended anisotropic diffusion filtering, make use of this information and are compared on synthetic data and on data acquired from two different off-the-shelf TOF cameras. Of these methods, the adapted anisotropic diffusion technique gives best results, and is implementable to perform in real time using current graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware. Like traditional anisotropic diffusion, it requires some parameter adaptation to the scene characteristics, but allows for low visualization delay and improved visualization of moving objects by avoiding long averaging periods when compared to traditional TOF image denoising.

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Holger Schöner, Volkmar Wieser, Bernhard Moser, Frank Bauer, Bettina Heise, Adrian A. Dorrington, Andrew D. Payne, and Michael J. Cree "Image processing for three-dimensional scans generated by time-of-flight range cameras," Journal of Electronic Imaging 21(2), 023012 (21 May 2012). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.21.2.023012

Published: 21 May 2012

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