Depth maps produced by LiDAR-based approaches are sparse. Even high-end LiDAR sensors produce highly sparse depth maps, which are also noisy around the object boundaries. Depth completion is the task of generating a dense depth map from a sparse depth map. While the earlier approaches focused on directly completing this sparsity from the sparse depth maps, modern techniques use RGB images as a guidance tool to resolve this problem. Whilst many others rely on affinity matrices for depth completion. Based on these approaches, we have divided the literature into two major categories; unguided methods and image-guided methods. The latter is further subdivided into multi-branch and spatial propagation networks. The multi-branch networks further have a sub-category named image-guided filtering. In this paper, for the first time ever we present a comprehensive survey of depth completion methods. We present a novel taxonomy of depth completion approaches, review in detail different state-of-the-art techniques within each category for depth completion of LiDAR data, and provide quantitative results for the approaches on KITTI and NYUv2 depth completion benchmark datasets.
Keywords: depth completion; depth maps; image-guidance.