Performance of Depth Camera D435 in Outdoor Environment

[lgang3]

How does the depth camera D435 work in an outdoor environment? What is the measurement distance and measurement error? The distance I measure in an outdoor environment is only about 4 meters. If it exceeds 4 meters, the error will be very large. Is there any way to increase the measurement distance and reduce the measurement error?

[MartyG]

​RealSense 400 Series cameras work excellently outdoors and can perform even better in strong light.

The 400 Series can depth sense to a range of 10 meters. If the image breaks up and becomes empty after 4 meters then turning off a post-processing filter called the Threshold Filter, if it is enabled, may make data visible to the full 10 meter range. This filter is enabled by default in the RealSense Viewer's "Post Processing" options.

Accuracy starts to noticably drift after about 3 meters due to a phenomenon called RMS Error, where error starts very low at zero distance and linearly increases as the distance of an observed object from the camera increases.

The D415 camera model has around half the RMS error of the D435 over the same distance, giving a result with less depth noise. You can though improve accuracy by using a high resolution (848x480 is the optimum for D435), and you can also set the camera to use a 'High Accuracy' configuration preset.

https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/wiki/D400-Series-Visual-Presets