• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.1-9
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• 2008

In this paper, to extract object regions in stereo image, we propose an enhanced algorithm that extracts objects combining both of brightness information and disparity information. The approach that extracts objects using both has been studied by Ping and Chaohui. In their algorithm, the segmentation for an input image is carried out using the brightness, and integration of segmented regions in consideration of disparity information within the previously segmented regions. In the regions where the brightness values between object regions and background regions are similar, however, the segmented regions probably include both of object regions and background regions. It may cause incorrect object extraction in the merging process executed in the unit of the segmented region. To solve this problem, in proposed method, we adopt the merging process which is performed in pixel unit. In addition, we perform the bi-directional stereo matching process to enhance reliability of the disparity information and supplement the disparity information resulted from a single directional matching process. Further searching for disparity is decided by edge information of the input image. The proposed method gives good performance in the object extraction since we find the disparity information that is not extracted in the traditional methods. Finally, we evaluate our method by experiments for the pictures acquired from a real stereoscopic camera.