A memory-efficient and time-consistent filtering of depth map sequences

̳View plus depth‘ is a 3D video representation where a single color video channel is augmented with per-pixel depth information in the form of gray-scale video sequence. This representation is a good candidate for 3D video delivery applications, as it is display agnostic and allows for some parallax adjustments. However, the quality of the associated depth is an issue, as the depth channel is usually a result of estimation procedure based on stereo correspondences or comes from a noisy and low-resolution range sensor. Therefore, proper filtering of the depth channel is needed before it is used for compression and/or view rendering. The problem is even more pronounced in video, where temporal consistency of the depth sequence is required. In this paper, we propose a filtering approach to refine the quality of noisy, blocky, and temporally-inconsistent depth maps. We utilize color constraints from the video channel and modify a previous super-resolution approach to tackle the time consistency for video. Our implementation is fast and highly memory efficient. We present filtering results demonstrating the superiority of the developed technique.