Weighted mode filtering and its applications to depth video enhancement and coding

This paper presents a novel approach for improving the quality of depth video. Given a high-quality color image and its corresponding low-quality depth image, we handle various artifacts which may exist on the depth video by applying a weighted mode filtering method based on a joint histogram. When the histogram is generated, the weight based on color similarity between reference and neighboring pixels on the color image is computed and then used for counting each bin on the joint histogram of the depth map. A final solution is determined by seeking a global mode on the histogram. Experimental results show that the proposed method has outstanding performance and is very efficient in various applications such as depth video enhancement and compression.