Guided Depth Completion Using Active Infrared Images in Time of Flight Systems

Abstract

Depth information has been successfully used in many computer vision applications, but depth imaging sensors frequently provide missing values, mainly around objects boundaries. These invalid values and image gaps cause serious problems in some applications. In order to estimate missing depth values and fill gaps in depth images (D), we propose a new algorithm for depth completion based on belief propagation. The rationale of the proposed technique is based on the idea that missing values must be estimated by taking into account object boundaries, mainly those related with depth discontinuities. Time of Flight (ToF) cameras provide depth information and some additional data, such as active infrared (IR) brightness images. Therefore, object boundaries information for depth missing areas can be reconstructed by using auxiliary IR information or by RGB images in RGB-D systems. These auxiliary images are used as a guidance for the depth completion, also known as depth inpainting. Experimental results show that our algorithm is very simple to implement, fast and produces better results than other more complex, and usually slower, existing methods.