Exploiting T-junctions for depth segregation in single images

Occlusion is one of the major consequences of the physical image generation process: it occurs when an opaque object partly obscures the view of another object further away from the viewpoint. Local signatures of occlusion in the projected image plane are T-shaped junctions. They represent, in some sense, one of the most primitive depth information. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of T-junctions for depth segregation in single images. Our strategy consists in incorporating ordering information provided by T-junctions into a region merging algorithm and then reasoning about the depth relations between the regions of the final partition using a graph model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.