Depth extraction method with subpixel matching for light-coding-based depth camera

Depth images extracted by light-coding-based depth cameras are widely used to reconstruct three-dimensional scenes in recent years. However, the retrieved depth accuracy greatly influences the reconstruction quality. Here, the authors present an appropriate depth extraction method based on subpixel matching to improve the depth accuracy. The proposed method utilises nearest neighbour interpolation to the projector's image plane to obtain depth values at subpixel accuracy, thereby better preserving the important depth information without changing any inner structure of the depth camera. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the depth images both on image quality and depth accuracy.