Calibration and registration for precise surface reconstruction with Time-Of-Flight cameras

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Abstract
This paper presents a method for precise surface reconstruction with Time-Of-Flight (TOF) cameras. A novel calibration approach, which simplifies the calibration task and doubles the camera's precision is developed and compared to current calibration methods. Remaining errors are tackled by applying filter and error distributing methods. Thus, a reference object is circumferentially reconstructed with an overall mean precision of approximately 3 mm in translation and 3° in rotation. The presented way of quantification for an achievable reconstruction precision with TOF cameras discloses the potential of localising and grasping objects with robot manipulators. This is a major criteria for the potential analysis of this sensor technology in robotics, which is first demonstrated within this work.