A computationally efficient denoising and hole-filling method for depth image enhancement

Depth maps captured by Kinect depth cameras are being widely used for 3D action recognition. However, such images often appear noisy and contain missing pixels or black holes. This paper presents a computationally efficient method for both denoising and hole-filling in depth images. The denoising is achieved by utilizing a combination of Gaussian kernel filtering and anisotropic filtering. The hole-filling is achieved by utilizing a combination of morphological filtering and zero block filtering. Experimental results using the publicly available datasets are provided indicating the superiority of the developed method in terms of both depth error and computational efficiency compared to three existing methods.