Precision of the kinect depth camera

kinect depth
Fabian picture Fabian · Oct 8, 2011 · Viewed 43.6k times · Source

How precise is the depth camera in the kinect?

  • range?
  • resolution?
  • noise?

Especially I'd like to know:

  • Are there any official specs about it from Microsoft?
  • Are there any scientific papers on the subject?
  • Investigations from TechBlogs?
  • Personal experiments that are easy to reproduce?

I'm collecting data for about a day now, but most of the writers don't name their sources and the values seem quite to differ...

Answer

mankoff picture mankoff · Oct 8, 2011
  • Range: ~ 50 cm to 5 m. Can get closer (~ 40 cm) in parts, but can't have the full view be < 50 cm.
  • Horizontal Resolution: 640 x 480 and 45 degrees vertical FOV and 58 degrees horizontal FOV. Simple geometry shows is about ~ 0.75 mm per pixel x by y at 50 cm, and ~ 3 mm per pixel x by y at 2 m.
  • Depth resolution: ~ 1.5 mm at 50 cm. About 5 cm at 5 m.
  • Noise: About +-1 DN at all depths, but DN to depth is non-linear. This means +-1 mm close, and +- 5 cm far.

There are official specs from the sensor developer, not from Microsoft. No scientific papers that I know of yet. Plenty of investigations and experiments (see Google). The OpenKinect has a lot more discussion on these things than this site for now.

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