Abstract

Depth and motion discontinuities arise wherever a light ray incident on a camera sensor meets a discrete change in the depth or motion of the surfaces in the world. Because these discontinuities tend to coincide with occlusions and with the boundaries of objects, they provide useful information for a number of applications in computer vision, such as camera control, compression, and tracking. Moreover, because they have simple, precise definitions depending only upon the physics of the scene, they are unaffected by subjective considerations. The first part of this thesis presents an algorithm to detect depth discontinuities from a stereo pair of images by matching pixels in corresponding scanlines and then propagating information between those scanlines. It uses a new measure of pixel dissimilarity that is provably insensitive to image sampling. The algorithm is fast and is shown to produce good results on difficult images containing untextured, slanted surfaces. Then some work aimed a...

Citations