Sequential construction of 3D-based scene description

A technique for constructing a sequential 3D-based scene description is proposed in this paper. Multiple small baseline 3D scene descriptions from a single moving camera or an array of cameras are used to sequentially construct a large baseline 3D 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.