Stereoscopic depth of field: why we can easily perceive and distinguish the depth of neighboring objects under binocular condition than monocular

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a high efficient and practical disparity estimation using hierarchical bilateral filtering for realtime view synthesis. The proposed method is based on hierarchical stereo matching with hardware-efficient bilateral filtering. Hardware-efficient bilateral filtering is different from the exact bilateral filter. The purpose of the method is to design an edge-preserving filter that can be efficiently parallelized on hardware. The proposed hierarchical bilateral filtering based disparity estimation is essentially a coarse-to-fine use of stereo matching with bilateral filtering. It works as follows: firstly, the hierarchical image pyramid are constructed; the multi-scale algorithm then starts by applying a local stereo matching to the downsampled images at the coarsest level of the hierarchy. After the local stereo matching, the estimated disparity map is refined with the bilateral filtering. And then the refined disparity map will be adaptively upsampled to the next finer level. The upsampled disparity map used as a prior of the corresponding local stereo matching at the next level, and filtered and so on. The method we propose is essentially a combination of hierarchical stereo matching and hardware-efficient bilateral filtering. As a result, visual comparison using real-world stereoscopic video clips shows that the method gives better results than one of state-of-art methods in terms of robustness and computation time.