Feature Pyramid Network Based Efficient Normal Estimation and Filtering for Time-of-Flight Depth Cameras

In this paper, an efficient normal estimation and filtering method for depth images acquired by Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras is proposed. The method is based on a common feature pyramid networks (FPN) architecture. The normal estimation method is called ToFNest, and the filtering method ToFClean. Both of these low-level 3D point cloud processing methods start from the 2D depth images, projecting the measured data into the 3D space and computing a task-specific loss function. Despite the simplicity, the methods prove to be efficient in terms of robustness and runtime. In order to validate the methods, extensive evaluations on public and custom datasets were performed. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the ToFNest and ToFClean algorithms are faster by an order of magnitude without losing precision on public datasets.