Depth estimation from a video sequence with moving and deformable objects

In this paper we present an algorithm for depth estimation from a monocular video sequence containing moving and deformable objects. The method is based on a coded aperture system (i.e., a conventional camera with a mask placed on the main lens) and it takes a coded video as input to provide a sequence of dense depth maps as output. To deal with nonrigid deformations, our work builds on the state-of-the-art single-image depth estimation algorithm. Since singleimage depth estimation is very ill-posed, we cast the reconstruction task as a regularized algorithm based on nonlocal-means filtering applied to both the spatial and temporal domain. Our assumption is that regions with similar texture in the same frame and in neighbouring frames are likely to belong to the same surface. Moreover, we show how to increase the computational efficiency of the method. The proposed algorithm has been successfully tested on challenging real scenarios.