Robust illumination invariant depth recovery by combining local phase and intensity information of images

Abstract

Both intensity and phase information of images have been the most important similarity measures in solving the general stereo matching problem. Intensity contains most of the imaging information of the scene/object, yet the phase information could reflect the local structure of images, which is more robust than the grayscale value. Plenty of work has been done in intensity-based or phase-based stereo matching methods. However, neither of them could work well enough when process images were taken under varied illuminations. A robust depth recovery method by making use of both intensity and phase information of stereo images properly is proposed. Firstly, 2D signal analysis is conducted by using the multiscale monogenic wavelet transform, from which local phase and intensity amplitude information are extracted into different scales. Secondly, disparity maps are estimated in different scales based on the intensity information. Thirdly, the optimal disparity is obtained by weighted-combining the disparity maps in different scales. The weighted coefficients are computed by making use of the phase information. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the benefits of the proposed method.