Three-dimensional vision cameras, such as RGB-D, use 3D point cloud to represent scenes. File formats as XYZ and PLY are commonly used to store 3D point information as raw data, this information does not contain further details, such as metadata or segmentation, for the different objects in the scene. Moreover, objects in the scene can be recognized in a posterior process and can be used for other purposes, such as camera calibration or scene segmentation. We are proposing a method to recognize a basketball in the scene using its known dimensions to fit a sphere formula. In the proposed cost function we search for three different points in the scene using RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus). Furthermore, taking into account the fixed basketball size, our method differentiates the sphere geometry from other objects in the scene, making our method robust in complex scenes. In a posterior step, the sphere center is fitted using z-score values eliminating outliers from the sphere. Results show our methodology converges in finding the basketball in the scene and the center precision improves using z-score, the proposed method obtains a significant improvement by reducing outliers in scenes with noise from 1.75 to 8.3 times when using RANSAC alone. Experiments show our method has advantages when comparing with novel deep learning method.

RGB-D cameras produce depth and color information commonly used in the 3D reconstruction and vision computer areas. Different cameras with the same model usually produce images with different calibration errors. The color and depth layer usually requires calibration to minimize alignment errors, adjust precision, and improve data quality in general. Standard calibration protocols for RGB-D cameras require a controlled environment to allow operators to take many RGB and depth pair images as an input for calibration frameworks making the calibration protocol challenging to implement without ideal conditions and the operator experience. In this work, we proposed a novel strategy that simplifies the calibration protocol by requiring fewer images than other methods. Our strategy uses an ordinary object, a know-size basketball, as a ground truth sphere geometry during the calibration. Our experiments show comparable results requiring fewer images and non-ideal scene conditions than a reference method to align color and depth image layers.