A One-Shot FPGA Based Depth Acquisition System

This paper introduces a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based one-shot depth acquisition system, which is a kind of Kinect-like Depth sensing. The proposed implementation integrates the random binary pattern with an improved matching method, which is able to obtain dense and precise depth maps. Scene images captured by a camera are transferred to FPGA (Xilinx Virtex7 XC7VX690T2FFG1761C) through a CamerLink interface, and the acquired depth results are sent to host computer through a high-speed USB3.0 interface. An elaborate FPGA architecture is designed to realize efficient and accurate calculations. The proposed system outperforms the existing stereo systems, not only on the quality of depth acquisition, but also on the reconstruction speed for which our system achieves 90 fps at a resolution of 1280 × 960. Besides, Kinect-like depth sensing has an inherent advantage in deployments, much easier than other kinds of systems. Our proposed system has extensive applications not only in the field of vision processing, but also in the fields where block matching is needed.