Disparity Estimation in Stereo Sequences using Scene Flow

This paper presents a method for estimating disparity images from a stereo image sequence. While many existing stereo algorithms work well on a single pair of stereo images, it is not sufficient to simply apply them to temporal frames independently without considering the temporal consistency between adjacent frames. Our method integrates the state-of-the-art stereo algorithm with the scene flow concept in order to capture the temporal correspondences. It computes the dense disparity images and scene flow in a practical and unified process: the disparity is initialized by a hybrid stereo approach which employs the over-segmentation based stereo and pixelwise iterative stereo; then the scene flow, estimated via a variational approach, is used to predict the disparity image and to compute its confidence map for the next frame. The prediction is modeled as a prior probability distribution and is built into an energy function defined for stereo matching on the next frame. The disparity can be estimated by minimizing this energy function. Experimental results show that the algorithm is able to estimate the disparity images in an accurate and temporally consistent fashion.