A Compact 3D Camera Suited for Mobile and Embedded Vision Applications

Stefano Mattoccia, Ilario Marchio, Marco Casadio; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2014, pp. 195-196

Recent years have seen the widespread diffusion of 3D sensors, mainly based on active technologies such as structured light and Time-of-Flight, enabling the development of very interesting 3D vision applications. This paper describes a compact 3D camera based on passive stereo vision technology suited for mobile/embedded vision applications. Our 3D camera is very compact, the overall area of the processing unit is smaller than a business card, lightweight, it weights less than 100 g including lenses, has a reduced power consumption, about 2 Watt processing stereo pairs at 30+ fps, and can be easily configured with different baselines and processing units according to specific application requirements. The overall design is mapped on a low cost FPGA, making the hardware design easily portable to other reconfigurable devices, and allows us to obtain in real-time accurate and dense depth maps according to state-of-the-art stereo vision algorithms.