VASC Seminar Announcement
            =========================

Date: Monday, 11/22/99
Time: 3:30-4:30pm
Place: Smith Hall 2nd Floor Common Area

Speaker:  Larry Zitnick
          CMU Robotics Institute
          http://www.ri.cmu.edu/people/zitnick_charles.html

Title:  A Cooperative Algorithm for Stereo Matching and Occlusion Detection

Abstract:

In this talk, I will present a stereo algorithm for obtaining
disparity maps with occlusion explicitly detected.  To produce smooth
and detailed disparity maps, two assumptions that were originally
proposed by Marr and Poggio are adopted: uniqueness and continuity.  
That is, the disparity maps have a unique value per pixel and are
continuous almost everywhere.  These assumptions are enforced within a
three-dimensional array of match values in disparity space.  Each match
value corresponds to a pixel in an image and a disparity relative to
another image.  I will describe an iterative algorithm that updates the
match values by diffusing support among neighboring values and
inhibiting others along similar lines of sight.  By applying the
uniqueness assumption, occluded regions can be explicitly identified.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm I will present the
processing results from synthetic and real image pairs, including ones
with ground-truth values for quantitative comparison with other methods.