Stereo Matching with Spatiotemporal Disparity Refinement Using Simple Linear Iterative Clustering Segmentation

Stereo matching is a challenging problem, especially for computer vision, e.g., three-dimensional television (3DTV) or 3D visualization. The disparity maps from the video streams must be estimated. However, the estimated disparity sequences may cause undesirable flickering errors. These errors result in poor visual quality for the synthesized video and reduce the video coding information. In order to solve this problem, we here propose a spatiotemporal disparity refinement method for local stereo matching using the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) segmentation strategy, outlier detection, and refinements of the temporal and spatial domains. In the outlier detection, the segmented region in the initial disparity is used to distinguish errors in the binocular disparity. Based on the color similarity and disparity difference, we recalculate the aggregated cost to determine adaptive disparities to recover the disparity errors in disparity sequences. The flickering errors are also effectively removed, and the object boundaries are well preserved. Experiments using public datasets demonstrated that our proposed method creates high-quality disparity maps and obtains a high peak signal-to-noise ratio compared to state-of-the-art methods.