US Patent 11209528 Time-of-flight depth image processing systems and methods

Time of Flight (ToF) depth image processing methods. Depth edge preserving filters are disclosed with superior performance to standard edge preserving filters applied to depth maps. In particular, depth variance is estimated and used to filter while preserving depth edges. In doing so, filter strength is calculated which can be used as an edge detector. A confidence map is generated with low confidence at pixels straddling a depth edge, and which reflects the reliability of the depth measurement at each pixel.