Color-guided depth map super-resolution via joint graph laplacian and gradient consistency regularization

Depth information is being widely used in many real-world applications. However, due to the limitation of depth sensing technology, the captured depth map in practice usually has much lower resolution than that of color image counterpart. In this paper, we propose to joint exploit the internal smoothness prior and external gradient consistency constraint in graph domain for depth super-resolution. On one hand, a new graph Laplacian regularizer is proposed to the preserve the inherent piecewise smooth characteristic of depth, which has desirable filtering properties. On the other hand, inspired by an observation that the gradient of depth is zero except at edge separating regions, we introduce a graph gradient consistency constraint to enforce that the graph gradient of depth is close to the thresholded gradient of guidance. Finally, the internal and external regularizations are casted into a unified optimization framework, which can be efficiently addressed by ADMM. Experiments results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art with respect to both objective and subjective quality evaluations.