Minimum Spanning Forest With Embedded Edge Inconsistency Measurement Model for Guided Depth Map Enhancement

Guided depth map enhancement based on Markov random field (MRF) normally assumes edge consistency between the color image and the corresponding depth map. Under this assumption, the low-quality depth edges can be refined according to the guidance from the high-quality color image. However, such consistency is not always true, which leads to texture-copying artifacts and blurring depth edges. In addition, the previous MRF-based models always calculate the guidance affinities in the regularization term via a non-structural scheme, which ignores the local structure on the depth map. In this paper, a novel MRF-based method is proposed. It computes these affinities via the distance between pixels in a space consisting of the minimum spanning trees (forest) to better preserve depth edges. Furthermore, inside each minimum spanning tree, the weights of edges are computed based on the explicit edge inconsistency measurement model, which significantly mitigates texture-copying artifacts. To further tolerate the effects caused by noise and better preserve depth edges, a bandwidth adaption scheme is proposed. Our method is evaluated for depth map super-resolution and depth map completion problems on synthetic and real data sets, including Middlebury, ToF-Mark, and NYU. A comprehensive comparison against 16 state-of-the-art methods is carried out. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations present the improved performances.