Time-of-flight image enhancement for depth map generation

Abstract

Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras are easily accessible in this era. They capture real distances of objects in a controlled environment. Yet, the ToF image may include disconnected boundaries between objects. In addition, certain objects are not capable of reflecting the infrared ray such as black hair. Such problems are caused by the physics of ToF. This paper proposes a method to compensate such errors by replacing them with reasonable distance data. The proposed method employs object boundary filtering, outlier elimination and iterative min/max averaging. After acquiring the enhanced ToF image, this can be applied to depth map generation by using the ToF camera with other color cameras. The experiment results show improved ToF images which lead to more accurate depth maps.