Real-Time Rgb-D Image Stitching Using Multiple Kinects For Improved Field Of View

This article concerns the problems of a defective depth map and limited field of view of Kinect-style RGB-D sensors. An anisotropic diffusion based hole-filling method is proposed to recover invalid depth data in the depth map. The field of view of the Kinect-style RGB-D sensor is extended by stitching depth and color images from several RGB-D sensors. By aligning the depth map with the color image, the registration data calculated by registering color images can be used to stitch depth and color images into a depth and color panoramic image concurrently in real time. Experiments show that the proposed stitching method can generate a RGB-D panorama with no invalid depth data and little distortion in real time and can be extended to incorporate more RGB-D sensors to construct even a 360 degrees field of view panoramic RGB-D image.