Noise Modeling in TOF Sensors with Application to Depth Noise Removal and Uncertainty Estimation in 3D Measurement

Time-Of-Flight (TOF) sensors provide real time depth information at high frame-rates. One issue with TOF sensors is the usually high level of noise (i.e. the depth measure’s repeatability within a static setting). However, until now, TOF sensors’ noise has not been well studied. We show that the commonly agreed hypothesis that noise depends only on the amplitude information is not valid in practice. We empirically establish that the noise follows a signal dependent Gaussian distribution and varies according to pixel position, depth and Integration Time (IT ). We thus consider all these factors to model noise in two new noise models. Both models are evaluated, compared and used in the two following applications: depth noise removal by depth filtering and uncertainty (repeatability) estimation in 3D measurement.