Depth Camera Technology Comparison and Performance Evaluation.

How good are cheap depth cameras, namely the Microsoft Kinect, compared to state of the art Time-of- Flight depth cameras? In this paper several depth cameras of different types were put to the test on a variety of tasks in order to judge their respective performance and to find out their weaknesses. We will concentrate on the common area of applications for which both types are specified, i.e. near field indoor scenes. The characteristics and limitations of the different technologies as well as the concrete hardware implementations are discussed and evaluated with a set of experimental setups. Especially, the noise level and the axial and angular resolutions are compared. Additionally, refined formulas to generate depth values based on the raw measurements of the Kinect are presented.