Joint Video and Sparse 3D Transform-Domain Collaborative Filtering for Time-of-Flight Depth Maps

This paper proposes a novel strategy for depth video denoising in RGBD camera systems. Today´s depth map sequences obtained by state-of-the-art Time-of-Flight sensors suffer from high temporal noise. All high-level RGB video renderings based on the accompanied depth map´s 3D geometry like augmented reality applications will have severe temporal flickering artifacts. We approached this limitation by decoupling depth map upscaling from the temporal denoising step. Thereby, denoising is processed on raw pixels including uncorrelated pixel-wise noise distributions. Our denoising methodology utilizes joint sparse 3D transform-domain collaborative filtering. Therein, we extract RGB texture information to yield a more stable and accurate highly sparse 3D depth block representation for the consecutive shrinkage operation. We show the effectiveness of our method on real RGBD camera data and on a publicly available synthetic data set. The evaluation reveals that our method is superior to state-of-the-art methods. Our method delivers improved flicker-free depth video streams for future applications, which are especially sensitive to temporal noise and arbitrary depth artifacts.