Human visual system and segment-based disparity estimation

In this paper, an efficient segment-based disparity estimation algorithm is proposed, based on wavelet transform and human visual system. The core idea is to estimate disparity not only from the left and right images but also from their decomposed sub-bands up to a certain level. The stereo image pair is divided into the segments of homogeneous color. Instead of assigning a disparity value to each pixel inside a segment, a disparity plane is assigned to each segment and the stereo matching problem is formulated as an energy minimization problem in the segmented domain. The optimal disparity plane labeling is approximated by applying belief propagation, which assigns the corresponding disparity plane to each segment. The obtained disparity maps are merged into a single disparity map using the human visual system model. Experiments with stereo image pairs show the validity of the proposed method.