Edge-preserving depth map upsampling by joint trilateral filter

Compared to the color images, their associated depth images captured by the RGB-D sensors are typically with lower resolution. The task of depth map super-resolution (SR) aims at increasing the resolution of the range data by utilizing the high-resolution (HR) color image, while the details of the depth information are to be properly preserved. In this paper, we present a joint trilateral filtering (JTF) algorithm for depth image SR. The proposed JTF first observes context information from the HR color image. In addition to the extracted spatial and range information of local pixels, our JTF further integrates local gradient information of the depth image, which allows the prediction and refinement of HR depth image outputs without artifacts like textural copies or edge discontinuities. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach over prior depth map upsampling works. ? 2017 IEEE.