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Image dense matching plays a crucial role in the reconstruction of three-dimensional models of buildings. However, large variations in target heights and serious occlusion lead to obvious mismatches in areas with discontinuous depths, such as building edges. To solve this problem, the present study mines the geometric and semantic information of line segments to produce a constraint for the dense matching process. First, a disparity consistency-based line segment matching method is proposed. This method correctly matches line segments on building structures in discontinuous areas based on the assumption that, within the corresponding local areas formed by two corresponding line pairs, the disparity obtained by the coarse-level matching of the hierarchical dense matching is similar to that derived from the local homography estimated from the corresponding line pairs. Second, an adaptive guide parameter is designed to constrain the cost propagation between pixels in the neighborhood of line segments. This improves the rationality of cost aggregation paths in discontinuous areas, thereby enhancing the matching accuracy near building edges. Experimental results using satellite and aerial images show that the proposed method efficiently obtains reliable line segment matches at building edges with a matching precision exceeding 97%. Under the constraint of the matched line segments, the proposed dense matching method generates building edges that are visually clearer, and achieves higher accuracy around edges, than without the line segment constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image dense matching plays a crucial role in the reconstruction of three-dimensional models of buildings. However, large variations in target heights and serious occlusion lead to obvious mismatches in areas with discontinuous depths, such as building edges. To solve this problem, the present study mines the geometric and semantic information of line segments to produce a constraint for the dense matching process. First, a disparity consistency-based line segment matching method is proposed. This method correctly matches line segments on building structures in discontinuous areas based on the assumption that, within the corresponding local areas formed by two corresponding line pairs, the disparity obtained by the coarse-level matching of the hierarchical dense matching is similar to that derived from the local homography estimated from the corresponding line pairs. Second, an adaptive guide parameter is designed to constrain the cost propagation between pixels in the neighborhood of line segments. This improves the rationality of cost aggregation paths in discontinuous areas, thereby enhancing the matching accuracy near building edges. Experimental results using satellite and aerial images show that the proposed method efficiently obtains reliable line segment matches at building edges with a matching precision exceeding 97%. Under the constraint of the matched line segments, the proposed dense matching method generates building edges that are visually clearer, and achieves higher accuracy around edges, than without the line segment constraint.

Stereoscopic image retargeting aims at converting stereoscopic images to the target resolution adaptively. Different from 2D image retargeting, stereoscopic image retargeting needs to preserve both the shape structure of salient objects and depth consistency of 3D scenes. In this paper, we present a stereoscopic image retargeting method based on deep convolutional neural network to obtain high-quality retargeted images with both object shape preservation and scene depth preservation. First, a cross-attention extraction mechanism is constructed to generate attention map, which contains the valuable attention features of the left and right images and the common attention features between them. Second, since the disparity map can provide accurate depth information of objects in 3D scenes, a disparity-assisted 3D significance map generation module is utilized to further preserve the valuable depth information of stereoscopic images. Finally, in order to predict the retargeted stereoscopic images accurately, an image consistency loss is developed to preserve the geometric structure of salient objects, and a disparity consistency loss is introduced to eliminate depth distortions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deep convolutional neural network can provide favorable stereoscopic image retargeting results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a significant branch of virtual reality, stereoscopic image stitching aims to generating wide perspectives and natural-looking scenes. Existing 2D image stitching methods cannot be successfully applied to the stereoscopic images without considering the disparity consistency of stereoscopic images. To address this issue, this paper presents a stereoscopic image stitching method based on disparity-constrained warping and blending, which could avoid visual distortion and preserve disparity consistency. First, a point-line-driven homography based disparity minimization method is designed to pre-align the left and right images and reduce vertical disparity. Afterwards, a multi-constraint warping is proposed to further align the left and right images, where the initial disparity map is introduced to control the consistency of disparities. Finally, a disparity consistency seam-cutting and blending method is presented to determine the optimal seam and conduct stereoscopic image stitching. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for stereoscopic image stitching, which aims to produce stereoscopic panoramas with rectangular boundaries. As a result, it provides wider field of view and better viewing experience for users. To achieve this, we formulate stereoscopic image stitching and boundary rectangling in a global optimization framework that simultaneously handles feature alignment, disparity consistency and boundary regularity. Given two (or more) stereoscopic images with overlapping content, each containing two views (for left and right eyes), we represent each view using a mesh and our algorithm contains three main steps: We first perform a global optimization to stitch all the left views and right views simultaneously, which ensures feature alignment and disparity consistency. Then, with the optimized vertices in each view, we extract the irregular boundary in the stereoscopic panorama, by performing polygon Boolean operations in left and right views, and construct the rectangular boundary constraints. Finally, through a global energy optimization, we warp left and right views according to feature alignment, disparity consistency and rectangular boundary constraints. To show the effectiveness of our method, we further extend our method to disparity adjustment and stereoscopic stitching with large horizon. Experimental results show that our method can produce visually pleasing stereoscopic panoramas without noticeable distortion or visual fatigue, thus resulting in satisfactory 3D viewing experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method for retargeting a pair of stereoscopic images. Previous works have leveraged seam carving and image warping methods for two-dimensional image editing to address this issue. However, they did not consider the full advantages of the properties of stereoscopic images. Our approach offers substantial performance improvements over the state-of-the-art; the key insights driving the approach are that the input image pair can be decomposed into different depth layers according to the disparity and image segmentation, and the depth cues allow us to address the problem in a three-dimensional (3-D) space domain for best preserving objects. We propose depth carving that extends seam carving in a single image to resize the stereo image pair with disparity consistency. Our method minimizes the shape distortion and preserves object boundaries by creating new occlusions. As a result, the retargeted image pair preserves the stereoscopic quality and protects the original 3-D scene structure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter proposes a novel warping-based method for the content-driven retargeting of stereoscopic images. Conventional algorithms in single image retargeting generally do not consider the scene depth saliency and disparity consistency when applied independently to left and right images . Therefore, the salient region and stereoscopic correlation of independently retargeted images can become corrupted. On the other hand, the proposed algorithm retains the stereo consistency of the retargeted images by matching the vertices of the grid and preserving the correspondence between them. Vertex disparity is propagated by a GPU interpolation to construct a sparse disparity map. To improve the capability of preserving visually important regions, the sparse disparity is used in conjunction with the image gradient in a saliency map computation. The experimental results show that the proposed method retains the correct disparity, while the salient objects remain undistorted in the retargeted stereoscopic image pairs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Occlusion might cause problems in stereo matching, especially when there are narrow objects with large disparity and illusion in the scene. Disparity consistency is introduced to handle these complicate scenes. The advantage of disparity consistency over those existed constraints is the integrity and illusion sensitivity. An algorithm using disparity consistency is provided. With this consistency constraint, the problems in the complex scene can be better solved than with the existed constraints and other methods. The results of experiment on synthetic images and real world images are presented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]