Depth estimation for semi-automatic 2D to 3D conversion

The conversion of monoscopic footage into stereoscopic or multiview content is a difficult and time consuming task. A number of semi-automatic methods have been developed to speed up the process and provide some control to the user. However these methods require that the user provide detailed labels indicating the relative depth of objects in the scene. In this paper we present a method to automatically estimate depth in such a way that it is amenable to semi-automatic conversion. The method is designed to simplify the depth labelling task so that the user does not have to provide as many depth labels.