Sequential construction of 3-D-based scene description

Binocular camera systems are commonly used to construct 3-D-based scene description. However, there is a tradeoff between the length of the camera baseline and the difficulty of the matching problem and the extent of the field of view of the 3-D scene. A large baseline system provides better depth resolution than a smaller baseline system at the expense of a narrower field of view. To increase the depth resolution without increasing the difficulty of the matching problem and decreasing the field of view of the 3-D scene, a sequential 3-D based scene description technique is proposed in this paper. Multiple small-baseline 3-D scene descriptions from a single moving camera or an array of cameras are used to sequentially construct a large baseline 3-D scene description while maintaining the field of view of a small-baseline system. A Bayesian framework using a disparity-space image (DSI) technique for disparity estimation is presented. The cost function for large baseline image matching is designed based not only on the photometric matching error, the smoothness constraint, and the ordering constraint, but also on the previous disparity estimates from smaller baseline stereo image pairs as a prior model. Texture information is registered along the scan path of the camera(s). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique in visual communication applications.