Discriminability Limits in Spatio-Temporal Stereo Block Matching

Disparity estimation is a fundamental task in stereo imaging and is a well-studied problem. Recently, methods have been adapted to the video domain where motion is used as a matching criterion to help disambiguate spatially similar candidates. In this paper, we analyze the validity of the underlying assumptions of spatio-temporal disparity estimation, and determine the extent to which motion aids the matching process. By analyzing the error signal for spatio-temporal block matching under the sum of squared differences criterion and treating motion as a stochastic process, we determine the probability of a false match as a function of image features, motion distribution, image noise, and number of frames in the spatio-temporal patch. This performance quantification provides insight into when spatio-temporal matching is most beneficial in terms of the scene and motion, and can be used as a guide to select parameters for stereo matching algorithms. We validate our results through simulation and experiments on stereo video.