Stereo Depth Estimation Algorithms

Introduction

The brain is a fantastic supercomputer with unmatched 3D object recognition and depth estimation. The ocular system has over 120 million rods and 6 million cones which send signals that are funneled into of our visual cortex resulting in our capability to see. The massive amounts of data and processing power of our brain, make it a fascinating phenomenon. Stereo depth is a major part of this machinery and in this paper, we delve into the topic by investigating existing computer algorithms. Depth extraction from stereo estimation boils down to Triangulation. The paper seeks to explain three primary approaches and details surrounding stereo depth extraction.

Background

Computer vision has seen explosive growth during the turn of the century; stereo depth in particular has seen its fair share of research due to its application in panorama mosaic, improved face tracking, facial recognition, autonomous driving, high resolution geometric sampling and many others. The result of this high interest is a plethora of algorithms and papers describing various ways of estimating depth from two images.

A typical stereo algorithm consists of four steps: matching cost computation, cost aggregation, optimization and disparity refinement [1]. Stereo correspondence, the process of matching pixels between stereo images, is essentially an optimization problem. The local or global categories for stereo depth estimation are determined by the way an algorithm solves the stereo correspondence problem.

Methods

"The wide range of modern dense matching algorithms can be assigned to two big categories: local methods, which evaluate the correspondences one point at a time, not considering neighboring points/measures, and global methods where some constraint on the regularity of results are enforced in the estimation"[2]. However, after the advent of the MC-CNN paper[3] a whole host of learning network algorithms have dominated the KITT data set.

Local or Block Method

Locally find a cost minima for a pixel across the scan line after selecting a template.

Global Method

Energy Minimization

Markov Random Fields have enable a statistical method of building out the disparity method

Other Methods

CNN

MC_CNN is an algorithm that started the movement The latest algorithms have implemented various approaches to improving on the idea of a learned stereo matching. The cost optimization designs, whether global or local, seek to gain an answer of whether a reference pixel is similar or not to the pixel under comparison. The machine learning networks seek to improve on this comparison step by adding apriori knowledge.

Difficult geometry and occlusion of disparate images are considered costs that are to be minimized in previously mentioned implementations. The learned neural nets attempt to be trained with various geometric image snippets with both positive and negative matches to be able to answer the question of similarity with a priori knowledge.

Features are first extracted from input images and then these features are combined together to determine a similarity score

Dynamic Programming

Scan line based traversal with a 2D dp matrix of pixel and disparity

Plane Sweeping

Take an image and warp to different disparity arrangements until a plan match is found and then iterate and solve for remaining items.

Results

Local based Algorithms perform well in smooth images with low occlusion <insert mask disparity> <insert bust and light bulb disparity>

Poor performance with increased occlusion <pipes performace> <Jade disparity map>

The costing function makes small changes within the same image <side by side and difference image of cones >

Global optimization does a much better job of handling occlusion and depth discontinuity <Block SSD vs ICM vs Graph cut comparison image here>

The implementation function selected can make a big difference < iterated conditional modes (ICM) vs graph cuts >

However, the latest KITT benchmarks are dominated by CNNs < insert KITT table >

Conclusions

In this paper, we have given a wide range of topics related to the available solutions for computer depth. The paper has attempted to describe the mathematical and computational components of a small piece of the computer vision, namely stereo depth estimation. Surely, this is not an exhaustive review but the paper seeks to introduce the various approaches and their fundamental ideas.

The state of the art with this problem set is wide and varied but with more stereo images with ground truths, the learned approaches are quickly becoming the norm. Although we take our innate capability of understanding the 3-dimensional geometry of the objects we see, the capability was enabled by a huge trove of a priori knowledge on top of the available planar intersection, shadow and ray tracing, relative size, convergence, defocus and accommodation cues. The world of computer vision is barely scratching the surface when compared to what nature has already perfected. The pace of innovation holds much promise that one day we will be able to outperform the human brain not only in depth perception but also in 3D reconstruction and recognition.