Occlusion handling based on support and decision

This paper proposes a novel method for handling occluded pixels in stereo images based on a probabilistic voting framework that utilizes a novel support-and-decision process. Occlusion handling aims to assign a reasonable disparity value to occluded pixels in the disparity maps. In an initial step, disparities and their corresponding supports at the occluded pixels are calculated using a probabilistic voting method using the disparities at visible pixels. In this way, the visible pixel information is propagated when the disparities and supports at the occluded pixels are computed. The final disparities for occluded pixels are then computed through an iterative support-and-decision process to propagate the information inside the occluded pixel region. An acceleration technique is also proposed to improve the performance of the iterative support-and-decision process. Experimental results show that the proposed occlusion handling method works well for several challenging stereo images.