Direct estimation of local surface shape in a fixating binocular vision system

Jonas Gårding and Tony Lindeberg

Proc. 3rd European Conference on Computer Vision (J.-O. Eklundh, ed.), vol. 800 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Stockholm, Sweden), pp. 365-376, Springer Verlag, New York, May 1994.

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of computing cues to the three-dimensional structure of surfaces in the world directly from the local structure of the brightness pattern of a binocular image pair. The geometric information content of the gradient of binocular disparity is analyzed for the general case of a fixating vision system with symmetric or asymmetric vergence, and with either known or unknown viewing geometry. A computationally inexpensive technique which exploits this analysis is proposed. This technique allows a local estimate of surface orientation to be computed directly from the local statistics of the left and right image brightness gradients, without iterations or search. The viability of the approach is demonstrated with experimental results for both synthetic and natural gray-level images.

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Related work: (Shape from texture using second-moment matrices) (Shape adaptation for improving the accuracy of local shape estimates) (Combined framework for direct computation of shape cues from local affine deformations) (Monograph on scale-space theory)

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Jonas Gårding Tony Lindeberg