Geodesic distance framework for contour-based consistent stereo image segmentation

This study concentrates on consistent object contour extraction method for stereo image segmentation after the object regions in the left image have been obtained. By taking advantage of the epipolar geometry, our approach introduces an energy optimization framework that incorporates both the stereo correspondence term and patch-based object contour probability term. The contour map is generated by integrating the terms of stereo correspondence and patch-based object contour probability; then, the optimal contours are obtained using geodesic distance technology. The core of the proposed method is to build upon an energy optimization framework with two key contributions: first, it incorporates the patch-based object contour probability term that introduces two search strategies to efficiently find the joint nearest neighbor patch pairs for the stereo image pair. The patch-based object contour probability term provides consistent and reliable priors for the contour extraction. Second, previous methods encounter missing pixels in the extracted contour in the occluded regions. Our approach overcomes this limit by introducing the geodesic distance technology to search the optimal contours. Experimental evaluation on Middlebury dataset and Adobe open dataset indicates that the results of our stereo image segmentation are comparable with or of higher quality than state-of-the-art methods. (c) 2018 SPIE and IS&T