On Calibration of a Low-Cost Time-of-Flight Camera

Time-of-flight (ToF) cameras are becoming more and more popular in computer vision. In many applications 3D information delivered by a ToF camera is used, and it is very important to know the camera's extrinsic and intrinsic parameters, as well as precise depth information. A straightforward algorithm to calibrate a ToF camera is to use a standard color camera calibration procedure [12], on the amplitude images. However, depth information delivered by ToF cameras is known to contain complex bias due to several error sources [6]. Additionally, it is desirable in many cases to determine the pose of the ToF camera relative to the other sensors used. In this work, we propose a method for joint color and ToF camera calibration, that determines extrinsic and intrinsic camera parameters and corrects depth bias. The calibration procedure requires a standard calibration board and around 20-30 images, as in case of a single color camera calibration. We evaluate the calibration quality in several experiments. The code for the calibration toolbox is made available online.