ToFNest: Efficient normal estimation for time-of-flight depth cameras

Abstract

In this work, we propose an efficient normal estimation method for depth images acquired by Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras based on feature pyramid networks (FPN). We perform the normal estimation starting from the 2D depth images, projecting the measured data into the 3D space and computing the loss function for the point cloud normal. Despite its simplicity, our method called ToFNest proves to be efficient in terms of robustness and runtime. In order to validate ToFNest we performed extensive evaluations using both public and custom outdoor datasets. Compared with the state of the art methods, our algorithm is faster by an order of magnitude without losing precision on public datasets. The demo code is available on https://github.com/molnarszilard/ToFNest