Simultaneous color camera and depth sensor calibration with correction of triangulation errors

Abstract

We propose a new depth correction method for the Kinect through the analysis of the technology behind this sensor. The depth values obtained from the Kinect are sometimes inaccurate because the manufacturer's calibration between IR projector and IR camera becomes invalid by the tolerances in manufacturing, temperature variation and vibration during transportation. To improve the results from the previous methods, an analytic approach is presented in this paper considering that the depth measurement principle of the Kinect is triangulation. Experiments show that the induced depth correction model is reasonable and the results from the proposed approach are better than those of the previous approaches. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.