How to interpret depth data from sensor_msgs/Image

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Hi,

I am using iai_kinect2 to get a depth cloud in the form sensor_msgs/Image on the topic /kinect2/sd/image_depth_rect. The topic contains :

header: 
  seq: 0
  stamp: 
    secs: 1451490491
    nsecs: 411043474
  frame_id: kinect2_ir_optical_frame
height: 424
width: 512
encoding: 16UC1
is_bigendian: 0
step: 1024
data: [176, 11, 0, 0, 176, 11,0, 52, 11, 29, 11, 52, 11, 29, 11, 122, 11, 170, 11, 221, 11, 174, 11, 191, 11, 166, 11, 187, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 131, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 180, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 114, 11, 86, 11, 131, 11, 0, 0, 131, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 50, 11, 43, 11, 138, 11, 251, 11, 152, 11, 85, 11, 47, 11, 68, 11, 122, 11, 124, 11, 123, 11, 109, 11, 0, 0, 199, 10, 0, 0, 117, 11, 140, 11, 0, 0, 64, 11, 91, 11, 0, 0, 0, 0, 241, 10, 0, 0, 223, 10, 19, 11, 115, 11, 121, 11, 102, 11, 136, 11, 173, 11, 169, 11, 93, 11, 73, 11, 123, 11, 151, 11, 124, 11, 96, 11, 49............]

As you see, data contains numbers between 0 and 255. How can I make sense of it? I want to use depthimage_to_laserscan to convert this depth image to laser scan but before that I need to perform some operations on the depth image (or depth_cloud) like removing points on the ground and noise and therefore, I need to know how to interpret this depth data. Can someone tell how to interpret this data?

Thanks in advance.
Naman Kumar