Semantically Guided Depth Upsampling

We present a novel method for accurate and efficient upsampling of sparse depth data, guided by high-resolution imagery. Our approach goes beyond the use of intensity cues only and additionally exploits object boundary cues through structured edge detection and semantic scene labeling for guidance. Both cues are combined within a geodesic distance measure that allows for boundary-preserving depth interpolation while utilizing local context. We model the observed scene structure by locally planar elements and formulate the upsampling task as a global energy minimization problem. Our method determines globally consistent solutions and preserves fine details and sharp depth boundaries. In our experiments on several public datasets at different levels of application, we demonstrate superior performance of our approach over the state-of-the-art, even for very sparse measurements.