A new multi-lateral filter for real-time depth enhancement

Abstract

We present an adaptive multi-lateral filter for real-time low-resolution depth map enhancement. Despite the great advantages of Time-of-Flight cameras in 3-D sensing, there are two main drawbacks that restricts their use in a wide range of applications; namely, their fairly low spatial resolution, compared to other 3-D sensing systems, and the high noise level within the depth measurements. We therefore propose a new data fusion method based upon a bilateral filter. The proposed filter is an extension the pixel weighted average strategy for depth sensor data fusion. It includes a new factor that allows to adaptively consider 2-D data or 3-D data as guidance information. Consequently, unwanted artefacts such as texture copying get almost entirely eliminated, outperforming alternative depth enhancement filters. In addition, our algorithm can be effectively and efficiently implemented for real-time applications.