Study of the SR4000 camera
Miguel Cazorla, Diego Viejo, and Cristina Pomares
I.U.I.I.
Universidad de Alicante
miguel.cazorla@ua.es, dviejo@dccia.ua.es, cpomares@dccia.ua.es
Abstract
3D data has been used for robotics tasks in the
last years. This data provides valuable infor-
mation about the robot environment. Tradi-
tionally, stereo cameras has been used to ob-
tain 3D data, but these kind of cameras do
not provide information in the lack of texture.
There is a new camera, SR4000, which uses
infrared in order to get richer information. In
this paper, we explore this camera in order to
know its main characteristics and how good is
the data from this camera in robotics tasks.
1 Introduction
During the last years, new 3D sensor devices
have been developed, and computing capa-
bilities have been improved. These improve-
ments can be used to obtain and process a
better robot environment information in the
field of mobile robotics [15], [11], [8]. By now,
methods for achieving tasks such as localiza-
tion [2], [5], [13], navigation [14], [10] or au-
tomatic map building [12], were restricted to
the two dimensional world which could be cap-
tured by the robot sensors. Nevertheless, us-
ing the new 3D sensors, it is possible to im-
prove the representation of observed objects
in order to use them into applications such
as augmented reality, architecture, manufac-
turing process, SLAM problem, etc. Further-
more, this new dimension can be used to im-
prove the methods and behaviors used by a
robot in order to accomplish its objectives. In
this way, the robots equipped with this new
3D sensors are able to move freely into a 3D
space, without being confined to the ground,
watching and avoiding 3D shape and volume
objects.
In this paper, we are going to study a new
3D camera, the SR4000 from Mesa Imaging.
This camera is not a stereo camera, but a
infrared one. One advantage of this kind of
cameras is that we get 3D data in areas when
no texture is present, like walls. Our goal is
to know how good is this camera for image
processing and robotics tasks. In a previous
work, we have developed an algorithm (see
[3]) which extract 2D features (like SIFT and
SURF) from stereo images and gives 3D coor-
dinates to them. Then, an ICP-like algorithm
is applied to get the egomotion of the camera.
We will try to adapt the previous algorithm
to the data from this camera. But, first, we
explain the characteristics of the SR4000 cam-
era: image resolution, the data obtained from
it, and some other interesting properties.
The paper is organized as follows: First, in
section 2 we present an overview of the camera
SR4000 and the data obtained from it. Then,
Section 3 gives a brief explanation about the
algorithm we are trying to apply to the cam-
era in order to test it. The results and con-
clusions obtained during this paper and the
future work in section 4.
2 Time-of-Flight 3D Camera
In recent years, Time-of-Flight (ToF) cam-
eras are being developed as a new technology
that delivers range (distance) and amplitude
maps by the use of a modulated light source.
The main advantages with respect to other
3D devices are the possibility to acquire data
at video frame rates and to obtain 3D point Table 1: SR4000 specifications
clouds without scanning and from just one
point of view. The basic principle of ToF cam- Pixel array size 176 (h) x 144 (v)
eras consists of an amplitude-modulated in- Field of View 43.6◦ (h) x 34.6◦ (v)
frared light source and a sensor field that mea- Pixel Pitch 40µm
sures the intensity of backscattered infrared Angular Resolution 0.23◦
light. The infrared source is constantly emit- Illumination wavelength 850nm
ting light that varies sinusoidally. Objects that Modulation Frequency 30Mhz
have different distances are reached by differ- Operating range 0.3 to 5.0 meters
ent parts of the sinusoidal wave. The reflected Distance accuracy +/-1cm
light is then compare to the original one, calcu- Maximun frame rate 54 fps
lating the phase shift, by means of measuring Dimensions 65x65x68mm
the intensity of the incoming light since the Weight 470g
phase shift is proportional to the time of flight
of the light reflected by a distant object. A
detailed description of the time-of-flight prin-
ciple can be found in [7]. measurements or to reject low quality ones.
The device used in this work is the Swis- The data output are arrays of 16 bit words,
sRanger SR4000 ToF camera, shown in Fig- of length (176 x 144 = 25344). By default,
ure 1. the amplitude data is converted into a value
which is independent of distance and position
in the image array. The amplitude data has
a range of 0-0x7FFF. In our experiments the
amplitude data has low contrast so they have
been equalized. Figure 2 shows an overview
for the typical data obtained with the SR4000.
The recorded 3D points cloud can be observed
at the figure top center, corresponding am-
plitud by the left side and confidence by the
Figure 1: SwissRanger SR4000 Time-of-Flight right. Reference camera coordinate system is
camera. also shown.

In order to give and idea of the characteris-

tics of the camera used in this work, the prin-
cipal specifications of the SR4000 camera are
reported in Table 1. For more details about
camera specifications see [1].
In our tests all the data were acquired
with the software provided with the camera,
which delivers point coordinates XYZ, ampli-
tude data of the scene and a confidence map of
the distance measurements. In particular, the
confidence map is obtained using a combina-
tion of distance and amplitude measurements
and their temporal variations: it represents a
measure of probability that the distance mea- Figure 2: Camera data overview. The SR4000 cap-
surement of each pixel is correct, so it can be tures both a 3D point set and two maps: amplitude
useful to select regions containing high quality (left) and confidence (right).
 The Field-of-View (the size of the area il-
luminated and measured by the SR4000) is a
function of the distance from the camera. The
lateral resolution of the camera is determined
by its Field-of-View in combination with the
number of pixels in the sensor field. Each of
the 176 (horizontal) and 144 (vertical) pixels
corresponds to approximately 0.23◦ of angular
resolution.
ToF cameras allow to generate point clouds
of real time acquisition. The accuracy of ToF
cameras varies with internal components and
the characteristics of the observed scene, such
us objects reflectivity and ambient lighting
conditions. These errors cannot be fully elimi-
nated, but they can be reduced and optimized
thanks to filtering or several techniques, such
us averaging techniques or calibration proce-
dures [4] where a distance error model was
proposed which provided a reduction of dis-
tance errors in the 1.5-4m distance measure-
ment range.
Integration Time is one of the most impor-
tant camera control. Adjusting this value con-
trols how long each sensor pixel collects light.
For lowest noise measurements the integration
time should be adjusted so that all (or at least
most) pixels collect as much light as possible
without saturating. On the other hand if a
high frame rate is more important then the in-
tegration time may be reduced to achieve the
desired frame rate. The camera software al-
lows to automatically adjust the Integration
Time depending on the maximum amplitudes
present in the current image. This setting
can be used to avoid pixel saturation and to
achieve a good balance between noise and high
frame rate. We placed the camera in a fixed
position and we took several images varying
the integration time. There was a skylight
ahead the camera so the ambient light affected
the performance. In Figure 3 three tests show
the variation of noise and saturation with dif-
ferent integration time values .
The following explanations relate to the er-
rors of the ToF camera. There are three non-
systematic errors. A bad signal-to-noise ra-
tio distorts the measurement and cannot be
suppressed. A solution can be increasing the
Figure 3: Effects are shown for different integra-
tion time values. First column shows the distance
maps, the second one shows the amplitude maps
and the third one the confidence map. In the first
row the integration time is set to 25ms (noise cor-
rupts the measure), in the second row it is set to
102ms (automatic, better tuning) and in the third
row it is set to 250ms, which causes saturation ef-
fects.
integration time and amplifying the illumina-
tion. The second error, due to interreflections
in the scene, is the multiple ways reflection,
and appears hollows and corners round off and
occluding shapes. Third, light scattering oc-
curs in the lenses of the ToF camera. This,
near bright objets may superpose the measure-
ments from the background objects. Further-
more, there are three systematic errors. First,
there is the distance-related error, based on
the assumption that the emitted light is si-
nusoidal. Second, an amplitude-error, caused
by non-linearities of the pixel’s electronic com-
ponents. Third, a fixed pattern phase noise,
where the triggering of each pixel depends on
the on chip. These three errors are manage-
able by calibration [6] [4]. Other important is-
sue for Tof cameras is the aliasing effect due to
the periodicity of the modulated signal, where
the distances to objects differing in phase by
360◦ of phase shift are not distinguishable. Us-
ing multiple frequencies is a common way of
dealiasing this data [7].
3 Applying an Feature Extraction
Algorithm to Amplitude Images
In this section we are going to test how good
are images from this camera in order to apply
a feature extraction algorithm. To do that, we
compute 6DoF egomotion using a ToF camera.
This is an adaptation of the method proposed
in [3]. In this paper a new approach for com-
puting egomotion from stereo images is pro-
posed. Basically, the process to obtain the
transformation between two consecutive im-
ages consists of extracting features from each
input image, translating the features to the
3D space using the sensor geometry, matching
those 3D features using their descriptors from
each input image and, finally, computing the
transformation that best aligns the matched
features.
The main difference from a stereo vision
camera and our SR4000 is that ours does not
captures an image in the visible spectra but
in the infrared. Therefore, we use the infrared
image for extracting visual features. For the
experiments presented in this paper we are us-
ing SIFT [9] features and descriptors. We ex-
tract features for the amplitude infrared im-
age. Figure 4 shows the SIFT features ex-
tracted from two amplitude images. In the
next step, features are translated to the 3D im-
age. Then, using the confidence map provided
by our camera, we can remove those features
we can not trust. This is an important dif-
ference from the stereo systems since it makes
enable an important accuracy improvement as
we remove erroneous points. The rest of the
method remains unaltered. The features from
two consecutive images are matched looking
for the nearest feature in the descriptors do-
main. Finally, the egomotion is computed
from the matched features.
4 Experiments and Conclusions
We have applied the algorithm explained in
the previous section to a sequence of images.
In Figure 4 we can see the result of applying
the Sift algorithm (Surf had similiar bad re-
sults) to two images of the sequence. Some
conclusions can be drawn from them:
• There are only a few number of features.
Due to the low image resolution, only 150
or 200 features are obtained. This is a
problem if our goal is to match features
between two images, if there is no so much
overlapping in those images.
Figure 4: Example of two consecutive images with
the Sift results.
• The quality of the images is low. There
are a lot of noise. This implies that al-
though we could get a good feature loca-
tion, descriptors are very different, so a
bad matching is obtained.
• Another problem with this camera is the
one shown in Figure 5 (see [1]). In this
case, the camera has bad behavior when
the surfaces are not perpendicular to it.
In Figure 4, the one of the left shows a
distortion on the sides (for example, the
column at the right). This makes again
different descriptors for the same feature.
• The last identified problem is the one
shown in Figure 6. There, when a bright
surface (like a door) is present and close
to the camera, some artifacts are present
and bad results are obtained from it. The
left images in Figure 6 are the amplitude
and the right ones are the confidence.
One of the advantages of this camera, as we
have exposed above, is the ability to get data
in the lack of texture.
Finally, we have tried to apply the egomo-
tion algorithm and the result (for a right tra-
jectory) is shown in Figure 7. We were not
able to get a good result due to the problems
 Figure 5: Problems due to distorsions.
Figure 7: Trajectory obtained applying a ICP-like
algorithm.
Figure 6: Problems due to reflections.
described above. As future work, we plan to
work with images in order to improve their
quality. We also plan to continue exploring
the response of the camera with computer vi-
sion algorithms.
Acknowledgment
This work has been supported by grant
DPI2009-07144 from Ministerio de Ciencia e
Innovacion of the Spanish Government.
References
[1] SR4000 User Manual.
[2] Wolfram Burgard, Dieter Fox, and Sebas-
tian Thrun. Active mobile robot localiza-
tion. Technical Report IAI-TR-97-3, 25,
1997.
[3] Miguel Cazorla, Diego Viejo, Andrs Hern-
ndez, Juan Nieto, and Eduardo Nebot.
Large scale egomotion and error analysis
with visual features. Journal of Physical
Agents, 4:19–24, 2010.
[4] Filiberto Chiabrando, Roberto
Chiabrando, Dario Piatti, and Ful-
vio Rinaudo. Sensors for 3d imaging:
Metric evaluation and calibration of a
ccd/cmos time-of-flight camera. Sensors,
9(12):10080–10096, 2009.
[5] Frank Dellaert, Dieter Fox, Wolfram Bur-
gard, and Sebastian Thrun. Monte carlo
localization for mobile robots. In IEEE
International Conference on Robotics and
Automation (ICRA99), May 1999.
[6] Stefan Fuchs and Gerd Hirzinger. Extrin-
sic and depth calibration of tof-cameras.
In CVPR, 2008.
[7] S. Burak Gokturk, Hakan Yalcin, and
Cyrus Bamji. A time-of-flight depth sen-
sor - system description, issues and so-
lutions. In CVPRW ’04: Proceedings of
the 2004 Conference on Computer Vi-
sion and Pattern Recognition Workshop
 (CVPRW’04) Volume 3, page 35, Wash-
ington, DC, USA, 2004. IEEE Computer
Society.
[8] Chen-Tsung Kuo and Shyi-Chyi Cheng.
3d model retrieval using principal plane
analysis and dynamic programming. Pat-
tern Recogn., 40(2):742–755, 2007.
[9] David G. Lowe. Distinctive image fea-
tures from scale-invariant keypoints. In-
ternational Journal of Computer Vision,
60:91–110, 2004.
[10] Gian Luca Mariottini and Domenico
Prattichizzo. Image-based visual servoing
with central catadioptric cameras. Int. J.
Rob. Res., 27(1):41–56, 2008.
[11] D. Schroter and M. Beetz. Acquir-
ing models of rectangular 3d objects for
robot maps. In Proc. IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation
ICRA ’04, volume 4, pages 3759–3764,
Apr 26–May 1, 2004.
[12] S. Thrun, D. Hahnel, D. Ferguson,
M. Montemerlo, R. Triebel, W. Burgard,
C. Baker, Z. Omohundro, S. Thayer, and
W. Whittaker. A system for volumet-
ric robotic mapping of abandoned mines.
In Proc. IEEE International Conference
on Robotics and Automation ICRA ’03,
volume 3, pages 4270–4275, 14–19 Sept.
2003.
[13] Sebastian Thrun, Dieter Fox, Wolfram
Burgard, and Frank Dellaert. Ro-
bust monte carlo localization for mo-
bile robots. Artificial Intelligence, 128(1-
2):99–141, 2001.
[14] A. Tsalatsanis, K. Valavanis, and
N. Tsourveloudis. Mobile robot naviga-
tion using sonar and range measurements
from uncalibrated cameras. In Proc. 14th
Mediterranean Conference on Control
and Automation MED ’06, pages 1–7,
June 2006.
[15] J. Weingarten, G. Gruener, and R. Sieg-
wart. A Fast and Robust 3D Feature Ex-
traction Algorithm for Structured Envi-
ronment Reconstruction. In None, 2003.