Minimum spanning forest with embedded edge inconsistency measurement for color-guided depth map upsampling

Abstract

Color-guided depth map up-sampling, such as Markov-Random-Field-based (MRF-based) methods, is a popular depth map enhancement solution, which normally assumes edge consistency between color image and corresponding depth map. It calculates the coefficients of smoothness term in MRF according to such assumption. However, such consistency is not always true which leads to texture-copying artifacts and blurring depth edges. In this paper, we propose a novel coefficient computing scheme for smoothness term in MRF which is based on the distance between pixels in the Minimum Spanning Trees (Forest) to better preserve depth edges. The explicit edge inconsistency measurement is embedded into weights of edges in Minimum Spanning Trees, which significantly mitigates texture-copying artifacts. The proposed method is evaluated on Middlebury datasets and ToF-Mark datasets which demonstrates improved results compared with state-of-the-art methods.