Guest Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue on RGB-D Vision: Methods and Applications

Abstract

The twenty-six papers in this special issue focus on Red Blue Green (RBG)-D vision, an emerging research topic in computer vision, with a number of applications in robotics, entertainment, biometrics and multimedia. Compared to 2D images and 3D data (including depth images, point clouds and meshes), RGB-D images represent both the photometric and geometric information of a scene. Moreover, low-cost consumer depth cameras (e.g., Microsoft Kinect v2, Intel Realsense, Orbbec Astra) can enable realtime applications due to their high acquisition frame-rate. In the last few years, a large number of RGB-D datasets have also been publicly released to tackle various vision tasks. Although remarkable progress has been achieved, several critical problems still remain open. The aim of this special issue is to stimulate researchers from different fields to present their state-of-the-art work, and to provide a cross-fertilization ground for discussions on the next steps in this important research area.