Precision of the kinect depth camera

• Range: ~ 50 cm to 5 m. Can get closer (~ 40 cm) in parts, but can't have the full view be < 50 cm.
• Horizontal Resolution: 640 x 480 and 45 degrees vertical FOV and 58 degrees horizontal FOV. Simple geometry shows is about ~ 0.75 mm per pixel x by y at 50 cm, and ~ 3 mm per pixel x by y at 2 m.
• Depth resolution: ~ 1.5 mm at 50 cm. About 5 cm at 5 m.
• Noise: About +-1 DN at all depths, but DN to depth is non-linear. This means +-1 mm close, and +- 5 cm far.

There are official specs from the sensor developer, not from Microsoft. No scientific papers that I know of yet. Plenty of investigations and experiments (see Google). The OpenKinect has a lot more discussion on these things than this site for now.

The Kinect for Windows SDK provide some constants which I've been using and seem to be consistent. For range and resolution, these values are:

In default mode:

• Minimum range: 80 cm
• Maximum range: 400 cm

In near mode:

• Minimum range: 40 cm
• Maximum range: 300 cm

For the color camera, you may have either of the following resolutions:

• 80x60
• 320x240
• 640x480
• 1280x960

For the depth camera, you may have either of the following resolutions:

• 80x60
• 320x240
• 640x480

Confronting the information from Avada Kedavra (and from most sources, by the way), the values for the field of view given by the API are the following:

For the color camera:

• Horizontal FOV: 62,0°
• Vertical FOV: 48,6°

For the depth camera:

• Horizontal FOV: 58,5°
• Vertical FOV: 45,6°

Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh855368