High-Order Energies for Stereo Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel segmentation approach for stereo images using the high-order energy optimization, which utilizes the disparity maps and statistical information of stereo images to enrich the high-order potential functions. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first one to formulate the problem of stereo segmentation as a high-order energy optimization problem, which simultaneously segments the foreground objects in left and right images using the proposed high-order potential function. A new method for designing the penalty function in our high-order term is proposed by the corresponding pixels and their neighboring pixels between left and right images. The relationships of stereo correspondence by disparity maps are further employed to enhance the connections between the left and right stereo images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively improve the performance of two kinds of stereo segmentation, including the automatic saliency-aware stereocut and the interactive stereo segmentation with user scribbles.