Enhancing 3D Capture with Multiple Depth Camera Systems: A State-of-the-Art Report

Abstract

Over the past decade, depth-sensing cameras rapidly found their way into consumer products and became a staple in computer vision, robotics, and 3D reconstruction systems. Under some circumstances, the use of multiple depth sensors brings unique advantages in facilitating model acquisition, such as capture from complementary points of view and higher sampling density, with the potential to reduce the effects of sensor noise. Typically, multiple camera systems allow users to obtain visual information that might be unavailable from a particular point of view in a single-camera setup. As a result of this characteristic, the use of multiple depth cameras has great potential for a number of applications. However, there are some challenges that arise when implementing multi-depth camera systems, including calibration, synchronization and registration. In this chapter, we survey how some of these challenges have been addressed and present the most comprehensive review to date of the techniques used to implement multiple depth-sensing camera systems. In addition, we present a wide array of applications supported by multiple depth camera systems (MDCs).