Real-time depth reconstruction from stereo sequences

We propose a fast depth reconstruction algorithm for stereo sequences using camera geometry and disparity estimation. In disparity estimation process, we calculate dense background disparity fields in an initialization step so that only disparities of moving object regions are updated in the main process using real-time segmentation and hierarchical disparity estimation techniques. The estimated dense disparity fields are converted into depth information by camera geometry. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides accurate depth information with an average processing speed of 15 frames/sec for 320 × 240 stereo sequences on a common PC. We also verified the performance of the proposed algorithm by applying it to real applications.