Vision based interpolation of 3D laser scans

3D range sensors, particularly 3D laser range scanners, enjoy a rising popularity and are used nowadays for many different applications. The resolution 3D range sensors provide in the image plane is typically much lower than the resolution of a modern color camera. In this paper we focus on methods to derive a high-resolution depth image from a low-resolution 3D range sensor and a color image. The main idea is to use color similarity as an indication of depth similarity, based on the observation that depth discontinuities in the scene often correspond to color or brightness changes in the camera image. We present five interpolation methods and compare them with an independently proposed method based on Markov Random Fields. The algorithms proposed in this paper are non-iterative and include a parameter-free vision-based interpolation method. In contrast to previous work, we present ground truth evaluation with real world data and analyse both indoor and outdoor data. Further, we suggest and evaluate four methods to determine a confidence measure for the accuracy of interpolated range values