The algorithm is useful to improve the sharpness of depth map at occluding boundaries obtained by video-rate stereo machines without occlusion handling capability. In order to realize the integration, we have developed an algorithm for detecting occlusion area and a correspondence algorithm with occlusion handling mechanism. Using the evaluation values that are computed in the correspondence search process without considering occlusion, occlusion area can be extracted with small additional computational cost. We have developed a polynocular stereo algorithm based on sort-oriented occlusion handling mechanism.
Experimental results using ground-truthed stereo images show the effectiveness of the integration.
This paper proposes a novel architecture for video-rate stereo machine. It is unfeasible to directly implement a video-rate machine with occlusion handling mechanism, because the computational cost for the correspondence search is higher than that of a simple polynocular stereo algorithm without occlusion handling. By switching two depth maps using motion information, the video-rate depth map is output for dynamic regions, while for static regions is given the dense depth map with sharp object boundaries. We have implemented a prototype system by using a commercially available video-rate stereo machine and a PC with an occlusion detectable algorithm on it.