Spatiotemporal stereo via spatiotemporal quadric element (stequel) matching

Spatiotemporal stereo is concerned with the recovery of the 3D structure of a dynamic scene from a temporal sequence of multiview images. This paper presents a novel method for computing temporally coherent disparity maps from a sequence of binocular images through an integrated consideration of image spacetime structure and without explicit recovery of motion. The approach is based on matching spatiotemporal quadric elements (stequels) between views, as it is shown that this matching primitive provides a natural way to encapsulate both local spatial and temporal structure for disparity estimation. Empirical evaluation with laboratory based imagery with ground truth and more typical natural imagery shows that the approach provides considerable benefit in comparison to alternative methods for enforcing temporal coherence in disparity estimation.