Fast hybrid block- and pixel-recursive disparity analysis for real-time applications in immersive teleconference scenarios

This paper presents a fast disparity analysis approach based on a hybrid block- and pixel-recursive matching scheme. The key idea 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 a processing of video in ITU-Rec. 601 resolution is required. Our algorithm is able to provide dense disparity vector fields for both directions (left-to-right and right-to-left) in real-time using one Pentium III, 800 MHz processor in reasonable quality.