Semi-automatic stereo extraction from video footage

We present a semi-automatic system that converts conventional video shots to stereoscopic video pairs. The system requires just a few user-scribbles in a sparse set of frames. The system combines a diffusion scheme, which takes into account the local saliency and the local motion at each video location, coupled with a classification scheme that assigns depth to image patches. The system tolerates both scene motion and camera motion. In typical shots, containing hundreds of frames, even in the face of significant motion, it is enough to mark scribbles on the first and last frames of the shot. Once marked, plausible stereo results are obtained in a matter of seconds, leading to a scalable video conversion system. Finally, we validate our results with ground truth stereo video.