High accuracy depth filtering for Kinect using edge guided inpainting

Kinect is an easy and convenient means to calculate the depth of a scene in real time. It is used widely in several applications for its ease of installation and handling. Many of these applications need a high accuracy depth map of the scene for rendering. Unfortunately, the depth map provided by Kinect suffers from various degradations due to occlusion, shadowing, scattering etc. The major two degradations are the edge distortion and shadowing. Edge distortion appears due to the intrinsic properties of Kinect and makes any depth based operation perceptually degraded. The problem of edge distortion removal has not received as much attention as the hole filling problem, though it is considerably important at the post processing stage of a RGB scene. We propose a novel method to remove line distortion in order to construct high accuracy depth map of the scene by exploiting the edge information already present in the RGB image.