Depth Camera Assessment

The driving question of this chapter is how competitive cheap consumer depth cameras, namely the Microsoft Kinect and the SoftKinetic DepthSense, are compared to state-of-the-art Time-of-Flight depth cameras. Several depth camera models from different manufactures are put to the test on a variety of tasks in order to judge their respective performance and to reveal their weaknesses. The evaluation will concentrate on the area of application for which all cameras are specified, i.e. near field indoor scenes.