A metrological characterization of the Kinect V2 time-of-flight camera

A metrological characterization process for time-of-flight (TOF) cameras is proposed in this paper and applied to the Microsoft Kinect V2. Based on the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM), the uncertainty of a three-dimensional (3D) scene reconstruction is analysed. In particular, the random and the systematic components of the uncertainty are evaluated for the single sensor pixel and for the complete depth camera. The manufacturer declares an uncertainty in the measurement of the central pixel of the sensor of about few millimetres (Kinect for Windows Features, 2015), which is considerably better than the first version of the Microsoft Kinect (Chow et al., 2012  [1]). This work points out that performances are highly influenced by measuring conditions and environmental parameters of the scene; actually the 3D point reconstruction uncertainty can vary from 1.5 to tens of millimetres.