A weighted least squares algorithm for time-of-flight depth image denoising

In this paper, we present a new denoising method for the depth image of a time-of-flight (ToF) camera, based on weighted least squares (WLS) framework. The common method for ToF depth image denoising is to use bilateral filter. However, the ability of bilateral filter in edge preservation would be reduced while we attempt to smooth out larger spatial scale noise. In order to avoid this problem and preserve the edge information as much as possible, we introduce a new way to construct edge-preserving ToF depth image denoising based on WLS. We are to our knowledge the first to present a WLS-based method for ToF depth image denoising. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with bilateral filter, our proposed algorithm not only achieves better performance in edge preservation, but also improves the PSNR values of the denoised images by 0.5–2.6 dB.