Depth enhancement by fusion for passive and active sensing

This paper presents a general refinement procedure that enhances any given depth map obtained by passive or active sensing. Given a depth map, either estimated by triangulation methods or directly provided by the sensing system, and its corresponding 2-D image, we correct the depth values by separately treating regions with undesired effects such as empty holes, texture copying or edge blurring due to homogeneous regions, occlusions, and shadowing. In this work, we use recent depth enhancement filters intended for Time-of-Flight cameras, and adapt them to alternative depth sensing modalities, both active using an RGB-D camera and passive using a dense stereo camera. To that end, we propose specific masks to tackle areas in the scene that require a special treatment. Our experimental results show that such areas are satisfactorily handled by replacing erroneous depth measurements with accurate ones. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.