Patent 9805294 was granted and assigned to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories on October, 2017 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method for denoising a range image acquired by a time-of-flight (ToF) camera by first determining locations of edges, and a confidence value of each pixel, and based on the locations of the edges, determining geodesic distances of neighboring pixels. Based on the confidence values, reliabilities of the neighboring pixels are determined and scene dependent noise is reduced using a filter.