Variational Stereo Vision with Sharp Discontinuities and Occlusion Handling

This paper addresses the problem of correspondence establishment in binocular stereo vision. We suggest a novel variational approach that considers both the discontinuities and occlusions. It deals with color images as well as gray levels. The proposed method divides the image domain into the visible and occluded regions where each region is handled differently. The depth discontinuities in the visible domain are preserved by use of the total variation term in conjunction with the Mumford-Shah framework. In addition to the dense disparity and the occlusion maps, our method also provides a discontinuity function revealing the location of the boundaries in the disparity map. We evaluate our method on data sets from Middlebury site showing superior performance in comparison to the state of the art variational technique.