A light transport model for mitigating multipath interference in Time-of-flight sensors

Continuous-wave Time-of-flight (TOF) range imaging has become a commercially viable technology with many applications in computer vision and graphics. However, the depth images obtained from TOF cameras contain scene dependent errors due to multipath interference (MPI). Specifically, MPI occurs when...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rhemann, Christoph, Izadi, Shahram, Sing Bing Kang, Ramesh, Naik, Nikhil Deepak, Kadambi, Achuta, Raskar, Ramesh
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110641
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9894-8865
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3254-3224
Description
Summary:Continuous-wave Time-of-flight (TOF) range imaging has become a commercially viable technology with many applications in computer vision and graphics. However, the depth images obtained from TOF cameras contain scene dependent errors due to multipath interference (MPI). Specifically, MPI occurs when multiple optical reflections return to a single spatial location on the imaging sensor. Many prior approaches to rectifying MPI rely on sparsity in optical reflections, which is an extreme simplification. In this paper, we correct MPI by combining the standard measurements from a TOF camera with information from direct and global light transport. We report results on both simulated experiments and physical experiments (using the Kinect sensor). Our results, evaluated against ground truth, demonstrate a quantitative improvement in depth accuracy.