Segmentation-Based Depth Propagation in Videos ∗

In this paper we propose a simple yet effective approach to convert existing 2D video content into 3D. We present a new semi-automatic algorithm that propagates sparse user-provided depth information over the whole monocular video sequence. The advantage of our algorithm over previous work comes from the use of spatio-temporal video segmentation techniques. The segmentation preserves depth discontinuities, which is challenging for previous approaches. A subsequent refinement step enables smooth depth changes over time and yields the final depth map. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed algorithm is able to produce good quality and temporal-coherent 3D videos.