Experimental combination of intensity and stereo edges for improved snake segmentation

In this paper, we present an algorithm to combine edge information from stereo-derived disparity maps with edges from the original intensity/color image to improve the contour detection in images of natural scenes. After computing the disparity map, we generate a so-called “edge-combination image,” which relies on those edges of the original image that are also present in the stereo map. We describe an algorithm to identify corresponding intensity and disparity edges, which are usually not perfectly aligned due to errors in the stereo reconstruction. Our experiments show that the proposed edge-combination approach can significantly improve the segmentation results of an active contour algorithm.