Severe tof noise

zenglu

I conducted experiments in a sewer-like scene I built myself. The tof(OAK-FFC-TOF-33D) was installed on the unmanned aerial vehicle. When the unmanned aerial vehicle rotated around the Z-axis (yaw, with an angular velocity of 0.4-0.7rad/s), motion blur (depth outliers) appeared in the depth map, which corresponds to very serious noise in the point cloud. The depth outliers in the depth map account for 1/3 of the entire depth map, as shown in the following figure.What should I do to get rid of these noises?Obviously, this rotational angular velocity of the unmanned aerial vehicle is too fast for tof, isn't it?

thanks

lovro

Hi,

Yeah, this kind of problem is pretty common with ToF sensors. When the device rotates fast (like in your case), the sensor struggles to capture accurate depth because the scene is moving too much during the exposure. ToF needs the scene to stay relatively stable while it emits and receives light signals — fast motion causes misalignment, which leads to depth outliers and noise in the point cloud.

If you can, try slowing down the rotation. If that’s not possible, and since I saw in your previous posts that you already applied some filtering, the next thing to try is post-processing the point cloud. Use something like radius or statistical filtering to remove outliers after generating the point cloud — that might help clean up some of the noise.

Hope that helps.