Department of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering, University of Brescia, Via Branze 38, 25125 Brescia, Italy.
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento, Via Sommarive, 9, 38123 Trento, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 3;23(1):538. doi: 10.3390/s23010538.
Time-of-flight cameras are widely adopted in a variety of indoor applications ranging from industrial object measurement to human activity recognition. However, the available products may differ in terms of the quality of the acquired point cloud, and the datasheet provided by the constructors may not be enough to guide researchers in the choice of the perfect device for their application. Hence, this work details the experimental procedure to assess time-of-flight cameras' error sources that should be considered when designing an application involving time-of-flight technology, such as the bias correction and the temperature influence on the point cloud stability. This is the first step towards a standardization of the metrological characterization procedure that could ensure the robustness and comparability of the results among tests and different devices. The procedure was conducted on Kinect Azure, Basler Blaze 101, and Basler ToF 640 cameras. Moreover, we compared the devices in the task of 3D reconstruction following a procedure involving the measure of both an object and a human upper-body-shaped mannequin. The experiment highlighted that, despite the results of the previously conducted metrological characterization, some devices showed evident difficulties in reconstructing the target objects. Thus, we proved that performing a rigorous evaluation procedure similar to the one proposed in this paper is always necessary when choosing the right device.
飞行时间（Time-of-Flight）相机广泛应用于各种室内应用，从工业物体测量到人体活动识别。然而，可用的产品在获取点云的质量方面可能存在差异，并且构造者提供的数据表可能不足以指导研究人员为其应用选择完美的设备。因此，这项工作详细说明了评估飞行时间相机误差源的实验过程，这些误差源在设计涉及飞行时间技术的应用时需要考虑，例如偏置校正和温度对点云稳定性的影响。这是朝着标准化计量特性描述程序迈出的第一步，该程序可以确保测试和不同设备之间的结果具有稳健性和可比性。该程序在 Kinect Azure、Basler Blaze 101 和 Basler ToF 640 相机上进行。此外，我们还比较了这些设备在涉及测量物体和人体上半身形状的人体模型的 3D 重建任务中的性能。实验结果表明，尽管进行了之前的计量特性描述，但一些设备在重建目标物体时明显存在困难。因此，我们证明了当选择正确的设备时，始终需要执行类似于本文中提出的严格评估程序。
