Depth Map Rasterization Using Triangulation and Color Consistency for Various Sampling Structures

The reconstruction of a dense depth map from sparsely sampled depth information has been studied to improve stereoscopic 3-D images. Among various sparse-to-dense depth map reconstruction methods, triangular-patch-based approaches have been widely used. However, the triangular-patch-based approaches suffer from a limitation in preserving depth discontinuities, because they assume that each triangular patch has a planar depth map. This paper presents a novel depth map rasterization method that considers the depth discontinuities and color consistencies in each triangular patch. The results of the experiment show that the proposed depth map rasterization method reconstructs dense depth maps with higher accuracy than the previous depth map upsampling methods for both regular and irregular depth map sampling structures.