IGAF: Incremental Guided Attention Fusion for Depth Super-Resolution

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2024-12, Vol.25 (1), p.24
• Main Authors: Tragakis, Athanasios, Kaul, Chaitanya, Mitchell, Kevin J, Dai, Hang, Murray-Smith, Roderick, Faccio, Daniele
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: convolutional neural networks; Data processing; deep learning; depth super-resolution; Medical imaging equipment; multimodal sensor fusion; Optimization; Robotics; Sensors
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s25010024

Accurate depth estimation is crucial for many fields, including robotics, navigation, and medical imaging. However, conventional depth sensors often produce low-resolution (LR) depth maps, making detailed scene perception challenging. To address this, enhancing LR depth maps to high-resolution (HR) ones has become essential, guided by HR-structured inputs like RGB or grayscale images. We propose a novel sensor fusion methodology for guided depth super-resolution (GDSR), a technique that combines LR depth maps with HR images to estimate detailed HR depth maps. Our key contribution is the Incremental guided attention fusion (IGAF) module, which effectively learns to fuse features from RGB images and LR depth maps, producing accurate HR depth maps. Using IGAF, we build a robust super-resolution model and evaluate it on multiple benchmark datasets. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results compared to all baseline models on the NYU v2 dataset for ×4, ×8, and ×16 upsampling. It also outperforms all baselines in a zero-shot setting on the Middlebury, Lu, and RGB-D-D datasets. Code, environments, and models are available on GitHub.