Temporal Upsampling of Depth Maps Using a Hybrid Camera

In recent years consumer-level depth sensors have been adopted in various applications. However, they often produce depth maps at a not very fast frame rate (around 30 frames per second), preventing them from being used for applications like digitizing human performance involving fast motion. On the other hand there are available low-cost faster-rate video cameras. This motivates us to develop a hybrid camera that consists of a high-rate video camera and a low-rate depth camera, and to allow temporal interpolation of depth maps with the help of auxiliary color images. To achieve this we develop a novel algorithm that reconstructs intermediate depth frames and estimates scene flow simultaneously. We have tested our algorithm on various examples involving fast, non-rigid motions of single or multiple objects. Our experiments show that our scene flow estimation method is more precise than purely tracking based method and the state-of-the-art techniques.