Metrological Qualification of the Kinect V2™ Time-of-Flight Camera

The Kinect V2™ is a Time-of-Flight (TOF) camera device with state-of-the-art performances. Including the first version of the device, Microsoft sold tens of million of Kinects, proposing appealing low-cost Three-dimension (3D) cameras below 200€. The main specifications of the Microsoft Kinect V2™ are summarized in Table 4.1. Bamji et al. (2015) released a full description of the 512 × 424 CMOS IR TOF sensor included in the Kinect V2™. The Kinect V2™ also incorporates a full HD RGB camera, calibrated with the aforementioned depth sensor, and provide colored depth maps and point clouds at roughly 30 Hz. In this chapter, we investigate the performances of the Kinect V2™ as a depth camera, focusing on uncertainty characterization according to the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM) (BIPM et al.2008). First of all, the TOF signal transmitted by the Kinect V2™ is evaluated. Then, stability is discussed as well as distribution normality. Range measurement uncertainty is studied at pixel and sensor scales. Last, qualitative results are provided in simple scenarios. Table 4.1 Kinect V2™: main characteristics IR camera resolution 512 × 424 (pix) RGB camera resolution 1080 × 1920 (pix) Maximum frame rate 30 (Hz) Field of View (FOV) 70(H) × 60(V ) (°) Measurement range 500–4500 (mm) Dimension 250 × 66 × 67 (mm) Weight 966 (g) Connection USB 3.0 + power supply Operating system Windows 8/10, Linux Software Kinect V2 SDK, libfreenect2