Occlusions, discontinuities, and epipolar lines in stereo

Binocular stereo is the process of obtaining depth information from a pair of left and right views of a scene. We present a new approach to compute the disparity map by solving a global optimization problem that models occlusions, discontinuities, and epipolar-line interactions. In the model, geometric constraints require every disparity discontinuity along the epipolar line in one eye to always correspond to an occluded region in the other eye, while at the same time encouraging smoothness across epipolar lines. Smoothing coefficients are adjusted according to the edge and junction information. For some well-defined set of optimization functions, we can map the optimization problem to a maximum-flow problem on a directed graph in a novel way, which enables us to obtain a global solution in a polynomial time. Experiments confirm the validity of this approach.