Robust non-local denoising of colored depth data

We give a brief discussion of denoising algorithms for depth data and introduce a novel technique based on the NL-Means Filter. A unified approach is presented that removes outliers from depth data and accordingly achieves an unbiased smoothing result. This robust denoising algorithm takes intra-patch similarity and optional color information into account in order to handle strong discontinuities and to preserve fine detail structure in the data. We achieve fast computation times with a GPU-based implementation. Results using data from a time-of-flight camera system show a significant gain in visual quality.