Fast selective interpolation for 3D depth images

Depth maps taken from depth cameras are often available at a lower resolution compared to the corresponding color images. In this paper, we propose a selective interpolation method to expand depth image to the size of the corresponding color image. To achieve our goal we selectively adopt either the bilinear smoothing filter or an edge-preserving filter to expand the low resolution depth map. The edge-preserving filters we considered in this paper are joint bilateral up-sampling (JBU) filter and the New Edge-Directed Interpolation (NEDI) filter. Our method not only maintains the visual quality of the interpolated depth image at edge regions, but it also reduces the computational complexity for real time execution.