Layer depth denoising and completion for structured-light RGB-D cameras

The recent popularity of structured-light depth sensors has enabled many new applications from gesture-based user interface to 3D reconstructions. The quality of the depth measurements of these systems, however, is far from perfect. Some depth values can have significant errors, while others can be missing altogether. The uncertainty in depth measurements among these sensors can significantly degrade the performance of any subsequent vision processing. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic model to capture various types of uncertainties in the depth measurement process among structured-light systems. The key to our model is the use of depth layers to account for the differences between foreground objects and background scene, the missing depth value phenomenon, and the correlation between coloR and Depth channels. The depth layer labeling is solved as a maximum a-posteriori estimation problem, and a Markov Random Field attuned to the uncertainty in measurements is used to spatially smooth the labeling process. Using the depth-layer labels, we propose a depth correction and completion algorithm that outperforms other techniques in the literature.