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 technique 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 consistency compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.