Cross-Scale Cost Aggregation for Stereo Matching

Human beings process stereoscopic correspondence across multiple scales. However, this bio-inspiration is ignored by state-of-the-art cost aggregation methods for dense stereo correspondence. In this paper, a generic cross-scale cost aggregation framework is proposed to allow multi-scale interaction in cost aggregation. We firstly reformulate cost aggregation from a unified optimization perspective and show that different cost aggregation methods essentially differ in the choices of similarity kernels. Then, an inter-scale regularizer is introduced into optimization and solving this new optimization problem leads to the proposed framework. Since the regularization term is independent of the similarity kernel, various cost aggregation methods can be integrated into the proposed general framework. We show that the cross-scale framework is important as it effectively and efficiently expands state-of-the-art cost aggregation methods and leads to significant improvements, when evaluated on Middlebury, KITTI and New Tsukuba datasets.Comment: To Appear in 2013 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 2014 (poster, 29.88%

Combining Stereo Disparity and Optical Flow for Basic Scene Flow

Scene flow is a description of real world motion in 3D that contains more information than optical flow. Because of its complexity there exists no applicable variant for real-time scene flow estimation in an automotive or commercial vehicle context that is sufficiently robust and accurate. Therefore, many applications estimate the 2D optical flow instead. In this paper, we examine the combination of top-performing state-of-the-art optical flow and stereo disparity algorithms in order to achieve a basic scene flow. On the public KITTI Scene Flow Benchmark we demonstrate the reasonable accuracy of the combination approach and show its speed in computation.Comment: Commercial Vehicle Technology Symposium (CVTS), 201

Multi-Scale 3D Scene Flow from Binocular Stereo Sequences

Scene flow methods estimate the three-dimensional motion field for points in the world, using multi-camera video data. Such methods combine multi-view reconstruction with motion estimation. This paper describes an alternative formulation for dense scene flow estimation that provides reliable results using only two cameras by fusing stereo and optical flow estimation into a single coherent framework. Internally, the proposed algorithm generates probability distributions for optical flow and disparity. Taking into account the uncertainty in the intermediate stages allows for more reliable estimation of the 3D scene flow than previous methods allow. To handle the aperture problems inherent in the estimation of optical flow and disparity, a multi-scale method along with a novel region-based technique is used within a regularized solution. This combined approach both preserves discontinuities and prevents over-regularization – two problems commonly associated with the basic multi-scale approaches. Experiments with synthetic and real test data demonstrate the strength of the proposed approach.National Science Foundation (CNS-0202067, IIS-0208876); Office of Naval Research (N00014-03-1-0108

Variational Disparity Estimation Framework for Plenoptic Image

This paper presents a computational framework for accurately estimating the disparity map of plenoptic images. The proposed framework is based on the variational principle and provides intrinsic sub-pixel precision. The light-field motion tensor introduced in the framework allows us to combine advanced robust data terms as well as provides explicit treatments for different color channels. A warping strategy is embedded in our framework for tackling the large displacement problem. We also show that by applying a simple regularization term and a guided median filtering, the accuracy of displacement field at occluded area could be greatly enhanced. We demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed framework by intensive comparisons with the Lytro software and contemporary approaches on both synthetic and real-world datasets

Depth from Monocular Images using a Semi-Parallel Deep Neural Network (SPDNN) Hybrid Architecture

Deep neural networks are applied to a wide range of problems in recent years. In this work, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is applied to the problem of determining the depth from a single camera image (monocular depth). Eight different networks are designed to perform depth estimation, each of them suitable for a feature level. Networks with different pooling sizes determine different feature levels. After designing a set of networks, these models may be combined into a single network topology using graph optimization techniques. This "Semi Parallel Deep Neural Network (SPDNN)" eliminates duplicated common network layers, and can be further optimized by retraining to achieve an improved model compared to the individual topologies. In this study, four SPDNN models are trained and have been evaluated at 2 stages on the KITTI dataset. The ground truth images in the first part of the experiment are provided by the benchmark, and for the second part, the ground truth images are the depth map results from applying a state-of-the-art stereo matching method. The results of this evaluation demonstrate that using post-processing techniques to refine the target of the network increases the accuracy of depth estimation on individual mono images. The second evaluation shows that using segmentation data alongside the original data as the input can improve the depth estimation results to a point where performance is comparable with stereo depth estimation. The computational time is also discussed in this study.Comment: 44 pages, 25 figure