Temporal filtering of depth Images using optical flow

Abstract

We present a novel depth image enhancement approach for RGB-D cameras such as the Kinect. Our approach employs optical flow of color images for refining the quality of corresponding depth images. We track every depth pixel over a sequence of frames in the temporal domain and use valid depth values of the same point for recovering missing and inaccurate information. We conduct experiments on different test datasets and present visually appealing results. Our method significantly reduces the temporal noise level and the flickering artifacts.