Color smoothing for RGB-D data using entropy information

RGB-D sensors are capable of providing 3D points (depth) together with color information associated with each point. These sensors suffer from different sources of noise. With some kinds of RGB-D sensors, it is possible to pre-process the color image before assigning the color information to the 3D data. However, with other kinds of sensors that is not possible: RGB-D data must be processed directly. In this paper, we compare different approaches for noise and artifacts reduction: Gaussian, mean and bilateral filter. These methods are time consuming when managing 3D data, which can be a problem with several real time applications. We propose new methods to accelerate the whole process and improve the quality of the color information using entropy information. Entropy provides a framework for speeding up the involved methods allowing certain data not to be processed if the entropy value of that data is over or under a given threshold. The experimental results provide a way to balance the quality and the acceleration of these methods. The current results show that our methods improve both the image quality and processing time, as compared to the original methods. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.