Real-time disparity analysis for applications in immersive teleconference scenarios-a comparative study

We present results of a comparative study of different fast disparity analysis approaches. Two of them are well known standard algorithms, while the third is a new approach based on a hybrid block- and pixel-recursive matching scheme. The key idea of the new algorithm is to choose efficiently a small number of candidate vectors in order to reduce the computational effort by simultaneously achieving spatial and temporal consistency in the resulting disparity map. The latter aspect is very important for 3D video conferencing applications, where novel views of the conferee have to be synthesised in order to provide motion parallax. For this application, processing of a video in ITU-Rec. 601 resolution is required. Our new algorithm is able to provide disparity vector fields for both directions (left to right and right to left) in real-time on one 800 MHz Pentium III in reasonable quality. The different disparity algorithms are compared with respect to reliability, quality of the resulting disparities and speed of the algorithm.