Learning a convolutional neural network for propagation-based stereo image segmentation

Stereo image segmentation is the key technology in stereo image editing with the population of stereoscopic 3D media. Most previous methods perform stereo image segmentation on both views relying primarily on per-pixel disparities, which results in the segmentation quality closely connected to the accuracy of the disparities. Therefore, a mechanism to remove the errors of the disparities are highly demanded. To date, there's no such a method yet that can produce accurate disparity maps. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN)-based framework, which will automatically propagate the segmentation result from one view to the other. The key problem of accurate stereo image segmentation is the missing of occluded regions. To solve this problem, the CNN architecture is proposed to improve the stereo segmentation performance. In order to address the inevitable inaccuracies problem of the disparities computed from a stereo pair of images, we utilize the coherent disparity propagation that propagates segment result via those pixels with coherent disparities. The pixels by coherent disparity propagation and the high confidence pixels of the object probability map produced by the CNN architecture are then used to generate the initial reliable pixels to perform an energy minimization framework-based segmentation. A comprehensive evaluations and comparisons on Middlebury and Adobe benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method in terms of high-quality results, and the robustness against various types of inputs.