Remove Kinect depth shadow

Question

I've recently started hacking on my Kinect and I want to remove the depth shadow. The shadow is caused by the IR emitter being positioned slightly to the side of the camera, so any close object will get a big shadow and distant object less or no shadow.

The shadow length is related to the distance between the closest and the farthest spot on each side of the shadow.

My goal is to be able to map the color image correctly onto the depth. This doesn't work without processing the shadow as this picture shows:

Answer 1

Does the depth shadow always come out black?

If so you could use a simple method like a temporal median to calculate the background of the image (more info here: http://www.roborealm.com/help/Temporal_Median.php) and then whenever a pixel is black, set it to the background value at that pixel location.