Local Detection of Stereo Occlusion Boundaries

Stereo occlusion boundaries are one-dimensional structures in the visual field that separate foreground regions of a scene that are visible to both eyes (binocular regions) from background regions of a scene that are visible to only one eye (monocular regions). Stereo occlusion boundaries often coincide with object boundaries, and localizing them is useful for tasks like grasping, manipulation, and navigation. This paper describes the local signatures for stereo occlusion boundaries that exist in a stereo cost volume, and it introduces a local detector for them based on a simple feedforward network with relatively small receptive fields. The local detector produces better boundaries than many other stereo methods, even without incorporating explicit stereo matching, top-down contextual cues, or single-image boundary cues based on texture and intensity.