Spatio-temporal consistency in video disparity estimation

We present a novel stereo video disparity estimation method. The proposed method is a two-stage algorithm. During the first stage, initial disparity maps are computed in a frame-by-frame basis. In the second stage, the initial estimates are treated as a space-time volume. By setting up an l1-normed minimization problem with a novel three-dimensional total variation regularization, spatial smoothness and temporal consistency are handled simultaneously. Due to our unique formulation, any existing image disparity estimation tech-nique may utilize our method as a post-processing step to refine noisy estimates or to be extended to videos. The proposed method shows superior speed, accuracy, and con-sistency compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. Index Terms — stereo vision, video disparity, signal de-noising, augmented Lagrangian, total variation minimization 1