Patent ID: 6911995

Claim:
A method for identifying a location of an object in a physical scene with a stereo camera comprising: identifying a virtual surface in the physical scene; constructing an approximate disparity set for the virtual surface; acquiring a main and a reference image of the scene with the stereo camera; warping the reference image according to the disparity set; subtracting pixels of the warped reference image from corresponding pixels of the main image to determine a depth residual of each pixel; acquiring a sparse set of point correspondences from a calibration pair of images; applying a polynomial interpolation to the sparse set of point correspondences to generate a smooth continuous approximate disparity set, wherein a particular disparity, d(x, y) is approximated by a linear system d(x, y)=Λ{tilde over (x)}(x, y), where Λ is an unknown matrix of coefficients, and {tilde over (x)}(x, y) is a power expansion of x=[x, y] T x ~ ⁡ ( x , y ) = [ x 2 y 2 xy x y 1 ] ; and identifying pixels having a substantially non-zero residual with a surface of the object not coincident with the virtual surface.