Fusing real-time depth imaging with high precision pose estimation by a measurement arm

Recently, depth cameras have emerged which capture dense depth images in real-time. To benefit from their 3D imaging capabilities in interactive applications which support an arbitrary camera movement, the position and orientation of the depth camera needs to be robustly estimated in realtime for each captured depth image. Therefore, this paper describes how to combine a depth camera with a mechanical measurement arm to fuse real-time depth imaging with realtime, high precision pose estimation. Estimating the pose of a depth camera with a measurement arm has three major advantages over 2D/3D image based optical pose estimation: The measurement arm has a very precise guaranteed accuracy better than 0.1mm, the pose estimation accuracy is not influenced by the captured scene and the computational load is much lower than for optical pose estimation, leaving more processing power for the applications themselves.