Joint iterative guidance filtering for compressed depth images

Abstract

In the general 3D scene, the correlation of depth image and corresponding color image exists, so many filtering methods have been proposed to improve the quality of depth images according to this correlation. Unlike the conventional methods, in this paper both depth and color information can be jointly employed to improve the quality of compressed depth image by the way of iterative guidance. Firstly, due to noises and blurring in the compressed image, a depth pre-filtering method is essential to remove artifact noises. Considering that the received geometry structure in the distorted depth image is more reliable than its color image, the color information is merged with depth image to get depth-merged color image. Then the depth image and its corresponding depth-merged color image can be used to refine the quality of the distorted depth image using joint iterative guidance filtering method. Therefore, the efficient depth structural information included in the distorted depth images are preserved relying on depth itself, while the corresponding color structural information are employed to improve the quality of depth image. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed filtering method by comparing objective and visual quality of the synthesized image with many existing depth filtering methods.