Enhancement of Image and Depth Map Using Adaptive Joint Trilateral Filter

In this paper, we present an adaptive joint trilateral filter (AJTF), which consists of domain, range, and depth filters. The AJTF is used for the joint enhancement of images and depth maps, which is achieved by suppressing the noise and sharpening the edges simultaneously. For improving the sharpness of the image and depth map, the AJTF parameters, the offsets, and the standard deviations of the range and depth filters are determined in such a way that image edges that match well with depth edges are emphasized. To this end, pattern matching between local patches in the image and depth map is performed and the matching result is utilized to adjust the AJTF parameters. Experimental results show that the AJTF produces sharpness-enhanced images and depth maps without overshoot and undershoot artifacts, while successfully reducing noise as well. A comparison of the performance of the AJTF with those of conventional image and depth enhancement algorithms shows that the proposed algorithm is effective.