Comparison of kinect v1 and v2 depth images in terms of accuracy and precision

Abstract

RGB-D cameras like the Microsoft Kinect had a huge impact on recent research in Computer Vision as well as Robotics. With the release of the Kinect v2 a new promising device is available, which will – most probably – be used in many future research. In this paper, we present a systematic comparison of the Kinect v1 and Kinect v2. We investigate the accuracy and precision of the devices for their usage in the context of 3D reconstruction, SLAM or visual odometry. For each device we rigorously figure out and quantify influencing factors on the depth images like temperature, the distance of the camera or the scene color. Furthermore, we demonstrate errors like flying pixels and multipath interference. Our insights build the basis for incorporating or modeling the errors of the devices in follow-up algorithms for diverse applications.