Motion-Depth: RGB-D Depth Map Enhancement with Motion and Depth in Complement

Tak-Wai Hui, King Ngi Ngan; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 3962-3969

Low-cost RGB-D imaging system such as Kinect is widely utilized for dense 3D reconstruction. However, RGB-D system generally suffers from two main problems. The spatial resolution of the depth image is low. The depth image often contains numerous holes where no depth measurements are available. This can be due to bad infra-red reflectance properties of some objects in the scene. Since the spatial resolution of the color image is generally higher than that of the depth image, this paper introduces a new method to enhance the depth images captured by a moving RGB-D system using the depth cues from the induced optical flow. We not only fill the holes in the raw depth images, but also recover fine details of the imaged scene. We address the problem of depth image enhancement by minimizing an energy functional. In order to reduce the computational complexity, we have treated the textured and homogeneous regions in the color images differently. Experimental results on several RGB-D sequences are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.