Consistent depth maps estimation from binocular stereo video sequence

In the paper, an approach is proposed for the problem of consistency in depth maps estimation from binocular stereo video sequence. The consistent method includes temporal consistency and spatial consistency to eliminate the flickering artifacts and smooth inaccuracy in depth recovery. So the improved global stereo matching based on graph cut and energy optimization is implemented. In temporal domain, the penalty function with coherence factor is introduced for temporal consistency, and the factor is determined by Lucas-Kanade optical flow weighted histogram similarity constraint (LKWHSC). In spatial domain, the joint bilateral truncated absolute difference (JBTAD) is proposed for segmentation smoothing. The method can smooth naturally and uniformly in low-gradient region and avoid over-smoothing as well as keep edge sharpness in high-gradient discontinuities to realize spatial consistency. The experimental results show that the algorithm can obtain better spatial and temporal consistent depth maps compared with the existing algorithms.