A color-guided, region-adaptive and depth-selective unified framework for Kinect depth recovery

Considering the existing depth recovery approaches that have different limitations when applying to Kinect depth data, in this paper, we propose to integrate their effective features including adaptive support region selection, reliable depth selection and color guidance together under a unified framework for Kinect depth recovery. In particular, we formulate our depth recovery as an energy minimization problem, which solves the depth hole-filling and denoising simultaneously. The energy function consists of a fidelity term and a regularization term. The fidelity term takes into account the characteristics of Kinect data. The regularization term is designed to incorporate the joint bilateral filtering (JBF) kernel and the joint trilateral filtering (JTF) kernel so as to facilitate both depth hole-filling and denoising. Moreover, the JBF kernel is modified to incorporate the structure information. Both simulations on the benchmark Middlebury dataset and experiments on real Kinect data show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of recovery accuracy and visual quality.