Depth segmentation in real-world scenes based on U–V disparity analysis

Abstract

Depth segmentation has the challenge of separating the objects from their supporting surfaces in a noisy environment. To address the issue, a novel segmentation scheme based on disparity analysis is proposed. First, we transform a depth scene into the corresponding U-V disparity map. Then, we conduct a region-based detection method to divide the object region into several targets in the processed U-disparity map. Thirdly, the horizontal plane regions may be mapped as slant lines in the V-disparity map, the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is improved to fit such multiple lines. Moreover, noise regions are reduced by image processing strategies during the above processes. We respectively evaluate our approach on both real-world scenes and public data sets to verify the flexibility and generalization. Sufficient experimental results indicate that the algorithm can efficiently segment and label a full-view scene into a group of valid regions as well as removing surrounding noise regions.