Sr-4000 Tof Camera: Further Experimental Tests and First Applications to Metric Surveys

In recent years, a new generation of active cameras, based on the Time-of-Flight (ToF) principle, has been developed. The main advantages with respect to other 3D measurement techniques are the possibility to acquire data at video frame rates and to obtain 3D point clouds without scanning and from just one point of view. Some experimental tests relative to the calibration of the distance measurements delivered by a ToF camera (SwissRanger-4000 camera) were reported in our previous works (Chiabrando et al., 2009). Starting from those results, in this paper three main tests are described, which are all related to the SR-4000 distance measurements: the influence of the scattering artifacts caused by multiple internal reflections, the evaluation of influence of the angle between the camera optical axis and the normal to the object surface on the distance measurement precision and an investigation of the influence of object reflectivity on the camera distance measurement accuracy and precision. A comparison between SR-4000 data and LiDAR data on a real object is reported in this paper in order to show the potentiality of ToF cameras for metric survey purposes. Finally, our first experiences on the use of the SR-4000 camera for 3D object reconstruction are reported. * Corresponding author