Material Classification Using Raw Time-Of-Flight Measurements

Shuochen Su, Felix Heide, Robin Swanson, Jonathan Klein, Clara Callenberg, Matthias Hullin, Wolfgang Heidrich; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 3503-3511

We propose a material classification method using raw time-of-flight (ToF) measurements. ToF cameras capture the correlation between a reference signal and the temporal response of material to incident illumination. Such measurements encode unique signatures of the material, i.e. the degree of subsurface scattering inside a volume. Subsequently, it offers an orthogonal domain of feature representation compared to conventional spatial and angular reflectance-based approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of our method through experiments and comparisons of real-world materials.