Frequency-Domain Joint Motion and Disparity Estimation Using Steerable Filters

In this paper, the problem of joint disparity and motion estimation from stereo image sequences is formulated in the spatiotemporal frequency domain, and a novel steerable filter-based approach is proposed. Our rationale behind coupling the two problems is that according to experimental evidence in the literature, the biological visual mechanisms for depth and motion are not independent of each other. Furthermore, our motivation to study the problem in the frequency domain and search for a filter-based solution is based on the fact that, according to early experimental studies, the biological visual mechanisms can be modelled based on frequency-domain or filter-based considerations, for both the perception of depth and the perception of motion. The proposed framework constitutes the first attempt to solve the joint estimation problem through a filter-based solution, based on frequency-domain considerations. Thus, the presented ideas provide a new direction of work and could be the basis for further developments. From an algorithmic point of view, we additionally extend state-of-the-art ideas from the disparity estimation literature to handle the joint disparity-motion estimation problem and formulate an algorithm that is evaluated through a number of experimental results. Comparisons with state-of-the-art-methods demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed approach.