A shadow repair approach for kinect depth maps

Abstract

The depth data provided by Kinect is incomplete because of no-measured depth (NMD for short) pixels, so a preprocessing approach for depth map is necessary. In this paper, a depth map repair approach is proposed for one specific NMD pixels' (shadow) removal. Firstly, the NMD pixels are divided into three types. Then a mathematical model based on the depth measurement of Kinect is built to explain the cause of shadow. A shadow discriminant based on the model is also designed. Finally, the repair approach is proposed for shadow regions detection and removal. Experimental results show that our method is both time saving and accurate. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.