Recent Advances in 3D Data Acquisition and Processing by Time-of-Flight Camera

Three-dimensional (3D) data acquisition and real-time processing is a critical issue in an artificial vision system. The developing time-of-flight (TOF) camera as a real-time vision sensor for obtaining depth images has now received wide attention, due to its great potential in many areas, such as 3D perception, computer vision, robot navigation, human-machine interaction, augmented reality, and so on. This paper survey advances in TOF imaging technology mainly from the last decade. We focus only on recent progress of overcoming limitations such as systematic errors, object boundary ambiguity, multipath error, phase wrapping, and motion blur, and address the theoretical principles and future research trends as well.