Dual-Way Guided Depth Image Inpainting with RGBD Image Pairs

Raw depth images acquired by low-cost range imaging sensors, such as Kinect v1 and Kinect v2, usually contain invalid regions without depth information and suffer from noise. Although many approaches are proposed to address the problems, the robustness of these approaches still needs enhancement. This paper introduces a dual-way guided inpainting method with RGBD image pairs to restore the missing depth values of invalid regions and to eliminate noise caused by acquisition apparatus. By leveraging the structural difference between the colour and depth images, the colour image is first segmented with watershed segmentation and then merged under the guidance of the simultaneously captured depth image, followed by inpainting the depth image guided by the merged colour image using Radial Basis Functions (RBFs). The proposed framework of the dual-way guided approach with the RBFs is new for depth image inpainting and outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches in the experimental evaluations.