Toward Occlusion-Free Depth Estimation for Video Production

We present a method to estimate a dense and sharp depth map using multiple cameras for the application to flexible video production. A key issue for obtaining sharp depth map is how to overcome the harmful influence of occlusion. Thus, we first propose to selectively use the depth information from multiple cameras. With a simple sort and discard technique, we resolve the occlusion problem considerably at a slight sacrifice of noise tolerance. However, boundary overreach of more textured area to less textured area at object boundaries still remains to be solved. We observed that the amount of boundary overreach is less than half the size of the matching window and, unlike usual stereo matching, the boundary overreach with the proposed occlusion-overcoming method shows very abrupt transition. Based on these observations, we propose a hierarchical estimation scheme that attempts to reduce boundary overreach such that edges of the depth map coincide with object boundaries on the one hand, and to reduce noisy estimates due to insufficient size of matching window on the other hand. We show the hierarchical method can produce a sharp depth map for a variety of images.