Abstract
Abstract. Nowadays time-of-flight (ToF) cameras and multiple RGB cameras are being embedded in an increasing number of high-end smartphones: despite their integration in mobile devices is mostly motivated by photographic applications, their availability can be exploited to enable 3D reconstructions directly on smartphones. Furthermore, even when a ToF camera is not embedded in a smartphone, low cost solutions are available on the market in order to easily provide standard mobile devices with a lightweight and extremely portable ToF camera. This work deals with the assessment of a low cost ToF camera, namely Pico Zense DCAM710, which perfectly fits with the above description. According to the results obtained in the considered tests, the ranging error (precision) of the DCAM710 camera increases linearly approximately up to the nominal maximum range in the considered working mode, up to approximately 1 cm. Despite the device allows to acquire measurements also at larger ranges, the measurement quality significantly worsen. After assessing the main characteristics of such ToF camera, this paper aims at comparing its 3D reconstruction ability with that of a smartphone stereo vision system. In particular, the comparison of a 3D reconstruction obtained with stereo vision from images acquired with an LG G6 shows that the stereo reconstruction leads to a much larger point cloud. However, points generated by the ToF camera are more homogeneously distributed, and they seem to slightly better describe the real geometry of the reconstructed object. The combination of such two technologies, which will be investigated in our future work, can potentially lead to a denser cloud with respect to the ToF camera, while preserving a reasonable accuracy.
Highlights
The availability of low cost depth sensors, which has been developed during the last decade mostly motivated by gaming purposes (e.g. Microsoft Kinect), led to the realization of alternative 3D reconstruction methods, in particular for small objects and indoor environments (Jozkow et al, 2014)
Since this work aims at comparing the Pico Zense DCAM710 results with those of smartphone stereo vision, with the future goal of integrating them in the future, the ToF camera characterization presented performed using the “Range0” setting in the Pico Zense DCAM710, which corresponds to setting the depth interval of interest between 35 cm and 150 cm
Image undistortion and point cloud generation utilities provided in the Pico Zense SDK were used in order to generate the results shown in this paper
Summary
The availability of low cost depth sensors (such as RGB-D cameras), which has been developed during the last decade mostly motivated by gaming purposes (e.g. Microsoft Kinect), led to the realization of alternative 3D reconstruction methods, in particular for small objects and indoor environments (Jozkow et al, 2014). From traditional laser scanners used in surveying applications, the maximum range of such low cost RGB-D cameras is usually limited to few meters, e.g. 5-10 m. Their usage in indoor environments became quite popular, eased by the development of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods in the robotics and computer vision communities (Whelan et al, 2016, Zollhofer et al, 2018). Despite several smartphones are provided with such sensors, currently most of the producers do not allow their complete access to developers Given such restriction, this work considers the use of a portable ToF camera that can be used as external sensor with a large variety of smartphones. Pico Zense DCAM710 camera is a low cost, small and lightweight device that can simultaneously acquire RGB, IR images and depth information at a 30 frames-per-second frequency, with the maximum resolutions reported in the following table: information type RGB IR Depth resolution 1920 × 1080
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