Multi-Direction Dictionary Learning Based Depth Map Super-Resolution With Autoregressive Modeling

3D depth cameras have become more and more popular in recent years. However, depth maps captured by these cameras can hardly be used in 3D reconstruction directly because they often suffer from low resolution and blurring depth discontinuities. Super resolution of depth maps is necessary. In depth maps, the edge areas play more important role and demonstrate distinct geometry directions compared with natural images. However, most existing super-resolution methods ignore this fact, and they can not handle depth edges properly. Motivated by this, we propose a compound method that combines multi-direction dictionary sparse representation and autoregressive (AR) models, so that the depth edges are presented precisely at different levels. In the patch level, the depth edge patches with geometry directions are well represented by the pre-trained multi-directional dictionaries. Compared with a universal dictionary, multiple dictionaries trained from different directional patches can represent the directional depth patch much better. In the finer pixel level, we utilize an adaptive AR model to represent the local correlation patterns in small areas. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that, the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art depth map super-resolution methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and subjective visual quality.