On Occluding Contour Artifacts in Stereo Vision

We study occluding contour artifacts in area-based stereo matching: they are false responses of the matching operator to the occlusion boundary and cause the objects to extend beyond their true boundaries in disparity maps. Most of the matching methods suffer from these artifacts; the effect is so strong that it cannot be ignored. We show what gives rise to the artifacts and design a matching criterion that accommodates the presence of occlusions as opposed to methods that identify and remove the artifacts. This approach leads to the problem of measurement contamination studied in statistics. We show that such a problem is hard given finite computational resources, unless more independent measurements directly related to occluding contours is available. What can be achieved is a substantial reduction of the artifacts, especially for large matching templates. Reduced artifacts allow for easier hierarchical matching and for easy fusion of reconstructions from different viewpoints into a coherent whole.