Mid-level Segmentation and Segment Tracking for Long-Range Stereo Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a novel way of combining dense stereo and motion analysis for the purpose of mid-level scene segmentation and object tracking. The input is video data that addresses long-range stereo analysis, as typical when recording traffic scenes from a mobile platform. The task is to identify shapes of traffic-relevant objects without aiming at object classification at the considered stage. We analyse disparity dynamics in recorded scenes for solving this task. Statistical shape models are generated over subsequent frames. Shape correspondences are established by using a similarity measure based on set theory. The motion of detected shapes (frame to frame) is compensated by using a dense motion field as produced by a real-time optical flow algorithm. Experimental results show the quality of the proposed method which is fairly simple to implement.