Key Engineering Takeaways
- •Active IR stereo projects an invisible dot pattern to provide texture for depth calculation in completely dark or featureless rooms.
- •Align depth frames to color frames in software/hardware before extracting 3D Cartesian coordinates of 2D bounding boxes.
- •OAK-D computes spatial [X, Y, Z] positions directly on its onboard VPU chip, offloading 100% of host CPU load.
Prerequisites
- • Camera basics
Active Stereo vs Structured Light vs Time-of-Flight
| Parameter | Active IR Stereo (RealSense D435) | Structured Light (Kinect V1 / Orbbec Astra) | Direct ToF |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outdoor Sunlight Performance | Excellent (Active IR + Passive Stereo) | Poor (Sunlight washes out IR pattern) | Moderate |
| Range | 0.2m - 10m | 0.5m - 3.5m | 0.2m - 5m |
| Edge Compute | Host CPU/GPU processing | Host processing | Host processing / Internal ASIC |
Tags:#Depth Cameras#RealSense#OAK-D#RGB-D#Stereo Vision#Point Clouds