Dense wide-baseline disparities from conventional stereo for immersive videoconferencing

We propose an algorithm creating consistent, dense disparity maps from incomplete disparity data generated by a conventional stereo system used in a wide-baseline configuration. The reference application is IBR-oriented immersive videoconferencing, in which disparities are used by a view synthesis module to create instantaneous views of remote speakers consistent with the local speaker's viewpoint. We perform spline-based disparity interpolation within non-overlapping regions. Regions are defined by discontinuity boundaries identified in the incomplete disparity map. We demonstrate very good results on significantly incomplete disparity data computed by a conventional correlation-based stereo algorithm on a real wide-baseline stereo pair acquired by an immersive videoconferencing system.