Guided inpainting and filtering for Kinect depth maps

Depth maps captured by Kinect-like cameras are lack of depth data in some areas and suffer from heavy noise. These defects have negative impacts on practical applications. In order to enhance the depth maps, this paper proposes a new inpainting algorithm that extends the original fast marching method (FMM) to reconstruct unknown regions. The extended FMM incorporates an aligned color image as the guidance for inpainting. An edge-preserving guided filter is further applied for noise reduction. To validate our algorithm and compare it with other existing methods, we perform experiments on both the Kinect data and the Middlebury dataset which, respectively, provide qualitative and quantitative results. The results show that our method is efficient and superior to others.