Surfaces with occlusions from layered stereo

We propose a new binocular stereo algorithm that estimates scene structure as a collection of smooth surface patches. The disparities within each patch are modeled by a continuous-valued spline, while the extent of each patch is represented via a pixelwise partitioning of the images. Disparities and extents are alternately estimated in an iterative, energy minimization framework. Experimental results demonstrate that, for scenes consisting of smooth surfaces, the proposed algorithm significantly improves upon the state of the art.