Efficient Depth Edge Detection Using Structured Light

This research features a novel approach that efficiently detects depth edges in real world scenes. Depth edges play a very important role in many computer vision problems because they represent object contours. We strategically project structured light and exploit distortion of the light pattern in the structured light image along depth discontinuities to reliably detect depth edges. Distortion along depth discontinuities may not occur or be large enough to detect depending on the distance from the camera or projector. For practical application of the proposed approach, we have presented methods that guarantee the occurrence of the distortion along depth discontinuities for a continuous range of object location. Experimental results show that the proposed method accurately detects depth edges of human hand and body shapes as well as general objects.