Differences between stereo and motion behaviour on synthetic and real-world stereo sequences

Performance evaluation of stereo or motion analysis techniques is commonly done either on synthetic data where the ground truth can be calculated from ray-tracing principals, or on engineered data where ground truth is easy to estimate. Furthermore, these scenes are usually only shown in a very short sequence of images. This paper shows why synthetic scenes may not be the only testing criteria by giving evidence of conflicting results of disparity and optical flow estimation for real-world and synthetic testing. The data dealt with in this paper are images taken from a moving vehicle. Each real-world sequence contains 250 image pairs or more. Synthetic driver assistance scenes (with ground truth) are 100 or more image pairs. Particular emphasis is paid to the estimation and evaluation of scene flow on the synthetic stereo sequences. All image data used in this paper is made publicly available at http: //www.mi.auckland.ac.nz/EISATS.