A robust stereo prior for human segmentation

Abstract

The emergence of affordable depth cameras has enabled significant advances in human segmentation and pose estimation in recent years. While it leads to impressive results in many tasks, the use of infra-red cameras have their drawbacks, in particular the fact that they don't work in direct sunlight. One alternative is to use a stereo pair of cameras to produce a disparity space image. In this work, we propose a robust method of using a disparity space image to create a prior for human segmentation. This new prior leads to greatly improved segmentation results; it can be applied to any task where a stereo pair of cameras is available, and segmentation results are desired. As an application, we show how the prior can be inserted into a dual decomposition formulation for stereo, segmentation and human pose estimation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.