Rotated top-bottom dual-kinect for improved field of view

Abstract

Existing commodity depth sensors have limited the field of view (FOV) of depth scanning. Our solution for extending the FOV is to use multiple depth sensors and stitch the captured depth images to a depth panorama. In our case study, we use two Kinects to address the following two questions: what is the best layout of the two Kinects to maximize the FOV and, second, how to combine the depth images together to form the depth panorama. We answer these questions by proposing a rotated top-bottom (RTB) arrangement of the two Kinects to maximize the FOV. Since the two Kinects capture the depth images from their own views, the depth values are not necessarily identical for the same object. To solve this problem, the depth adjustments are made for a frontal reference coordinate. Moreover, the perspective distortions of the two Kinects with respect to the frontal reference coordinate are corrected by perspective transformations. Experimental results show that our RTB sensor can generate panorama depth images with an almost doubled FOV.