A Depth Camera for Natural Human-Computer Interaction Based on Near-Infrared Imaging and Structured Light

Designing of a novel depth camera is presented, which targets close-range (20-60cm) natural human-computer interaction especially for mobile terminals. In order to achieve high precision through the working range, a two-stepping method is employed to match the near infrared intensity image to absolute depth in real-time. First, we use structured light achieved by an 808nm laser diode and a Dammann grating to coarsely quantize the output space of depth values into discrete bins. Then use a learning-based classification forest algorithm to predict the depth distribution over these bins for each pixel in the image. The quantitative experimental results show that this depth camera has 1% precision over range of 20-60cm, which show that the camera suit resource-limited and low-cost application.