ABSTRACT
Many means to recover scene depth have been introduced so far. They range from specialized sensors that can directly return depth (e.g., LiDAR sensors and ToF sensors described in Chapter 4) to the most widely used stereo matching algorithms in Chapter 8 that require just two or more images as input. As with many real-world situations, for example in the context of cultural heritage (Chapter 22), there is no single method that can claim to be the panacea for all and every application that relies on depth data. As shown in Table 9.1, these different depth sensing approaches all have their advantages and disadvantages with respect to several criteria. Some of the disadvantages are inherent to the principle of operations, such as the quadratically growing depth error in stereo, while others are due to design
Table 9.1: Characteristics of different depth sensing methods.
