A Novel Interpolation Scheme for Range Data with Side Information

Time-of-Flight matrix sensors currently available allow for the acquisition of range maps at video rate but usually have a limited resolution. At the same time high resolution color cameras are widely available. This makes highly desirable methods that are able to exploit the combined use of ToF sensors and color cameras to obtain high resolution range maps. This work presents a novel interpolation technique that exploits side information from a standard color camera to increase the resolution of range maps. A segmented version of the high resolution color image is used in order to identify the main objects in the scene, while a novel surface prediction scheme is used to interpolate the available depth samples. Critical issues like the joint calibration of the two devices and the unreliability of the acquired data have also been taken into account with ad- hoc solutions. The performance of the proposed scheme has been verified with both synthetic and real-world data and experimental results have shown how the proposed method allows to obtain a more accurate interpolation with sharper edges if compared with standard approaches.