Robot Vision System based on a 3D-TOF Camera

ToF cameras for active vision in robotics

“…A classical solution in the area of object modeling is the use of calibrated stereo rigs. Therefore, initial works were devoted to their comparison with [37] Dynamic object detection and classification Color and light independence PMD Hussmann and Liepert [38] Object pose Easy object/background segmentation PMD Guomundsson et al [39] Known object pose estimation Light independent / Absolute scale SR3 Beder et al [40] Surface reconstruction using patchlets ToF easily combines with stereo PMD Fuchs and May [7] Precise surface reconstruction 3D at high rate SR3/O3D100 (Depth) Dellen et al [5] 3D object reconstruction 3D at high rate SR3 (Depth) Foix et al [6] Kuehnle et al [8] Object recognition for grasping 3D allow geometric primitives search SR3 Grundmann et al [41] Collision free object manipulation 3D at high rate SR3 + stereo Reiser and Kubacki [42] Position based visual servoing 3D is simply obtained / No model needed SR3 (Depth) Gachter et al [43] Object part detection for classification 3D at high rate SR3 Shin et al [44] SR2 Klank et al [45] Mobile manipulation Easy table/object segmentation SR4 Marton et al [46] Object categorization ToF easily combines with stereo SR4 + color Nakamura et al [47] Mobile manipulation Easy table segmentation SR4 + color Saxena et al [9] Grasping unknown objects 3D at high rate SR3 + stereo Zhu et al [48] Short range depth maps ToF easily combines with stereo SR3 + stereo Lindner et al [49] Object segmentation for recognition Easy color registration PMD + color camera Fischer et al [50] Occlusion handling in virtual objects 3D at high rate PMD + color camera…”

“…For planar and untextured object surfaces, where stereo techniques clearly fail, Ghobadi et al [37] compared the results of a dynamic object detection algorithm based on SVM using stereo and ToF depth images. In the same manner, Hussmann and Liepert [38] also compared ToF and stereo vision for object pose computation. The key difference favorable to ToF camera is its ability to effectively segment the object and the background, even if their color or texture is exactly the same (i.e.…”

A MATLAB-Based Application Development Using a 3D PMD Camera for a Mobile Robot

“…In [7] a 3D-ToF PMD camera is proposed as a robot vision system and an application is described for object segmentation algorithms compared to a stereo vision system. Hussmann et al present in [15] an integration of a ToF sensor into an autonomous mobile robot system.…”

“…This high frame rate has to be balanced with the measurement precisions [6]. Stereo vision systems involve high amount of computational power [7] and they need a great deal of performance for finding the correspondence point from both left and right images in order to be able to calculate the depth information [8]. Since one decade, a new generation of ToF cameras, the PMD, has been invented.…”

Novel methods for image-guided ToF depth upsampling

“…Due to their small weight, low consumption and lack of mobile parts, ToF cameras are widely used in numerous application areas [14] such as robot vision [18] and navigation [34], [38], simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) [23], [13], 3D reconstruction [19], [33], 3DTV [36], [31], human-computer interaction (HCI) [15], [29] and computer graphics [20], [27].…”