A Noise‐aware Filter for Real‐time Depth Upsampling

A new generation of active 3D range sensors, such as time-of-flight cameras, enables recording of full-frame depth maps at video frame rate. Unfortunately, the captured data are typically starkly contaminated by noise and the sensors feature only a rather limited image resolution. We therefore present a pipeline to enhance the quality and increase the spatial resolution of range data in real-time by upsampling the range information with the data from a high resolution video camera. Our algorithm is an adaptive multi-lateral upsampling filter that takes into account the inherent noisy nature of real-time depth data. Thus, we can greatly improve reconstruction quality, boost the resolution of the data to that of the video sensor, and prevent unwanted artifacts like texture copy into geometry. Our technique has been crafted to achieve improvement in depth map quality while maintaining high computational efficiency for a real-time application. By implementing our approach on the GPU, the creation of a real-time 3D camera with video camera resolution is feasible.