Incident light related distance error study and calibration of the PMD-range imaging camera

For various applications, such as object recognition or tracking and especially when the object is partly occluded or articulated, 3D information is crucial for the robustness of the application. A recently developed sensor to acquire distance information is based on the Photo Mixer Device (PMD)for which a distance error based on different causes can be observed. This article presents an improved distance calibration approach for PMD-based distance sensoring which handles objects with different Lambertian reflectance properties. Within this scope the relation of the sources of distance errors were investigated. Where applicable they were isolated for relational studies with the actuating variables, i.e. integration time, amplitude and measured distance, as these are the only parameters available for the calibration. The calibration results of the proposed method excel the results of all other known methods. In particular with objects with unknown reflectance properties a significant reduction of the error is achieved.