Depth enhancement using RGB-D guided filtering

Depth maps from low-cost RGB-D system are generally noisy and not accurate enough. Holes often exist in the depth maps. Bilateral filter is commonly utilized to perform depth enhancement. However, it requires high computational time. Its texture transferring property also makes those boundaries between textured and homogeneous regions in the filtered depth map far from satisfactory. In this paper, we present a method to filter raw depth maps using a RGB-D guided filtering in a two-stage framework. Our method not only has a faster computational time than bilateral filter but also avoids the problem of over-texture transfer. We also use RGB-D frames to fill holes in the depth maps. This can effectively prevents depth bleeding artifacts.